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Updated: June 17, 2025
The humble funeral train passed under a bridge arch into the empty Grassmarket, and went up Candlemakers Row to the kirkyard gate. Such as Auld Jock, now, by unnumbered thousands, were coming to lie among the grand and great, laird and leddy, poet and prophet, persecutor and martyr, in the piled-up, historic burying-ground of old Greyfriars.
When Mistress Jeanie tucked her knitting-needles in her belt, and went up to the lodge to put the dinner over the fire, the caretaker went down toward Candlemakers Row to trim the grass about the martyrs' monument. Bobby dutifully trotted at his heels.
By a gesture the caretaker directed the bearers to the right, past the church, and on down the crowded slope to the north, that was circled about by the backs of the tenements in the Grassmarket and Candlemakers Row. The box was lowered at once, and the pall-bearers hastily departed to delayed dinners. The policemen had urgent duties elsewhere.
Crippled Tammy Barr called out in shrill excitement, "Ailie! O-o-oh, Ailie Lindsey, there's the wee doggie!" "Whaur?" The lassie's elfin face looked out from a low, rear window of the Candlemakers' Guildhall at the top of the Row. "On the stane by the kirk wa'." "I see 'im noo. Isna he bonny? I wish Bobby could bide i' the kirkyaird, but they wadna let 'im.
He had escaped notice from the tenements all the morning because the view from most of the windows was blocked by washings, hung out and dripping, then freezing and clapping against the old tombs. It was half-past three o'clock when a tiny, wizened face popped out of one of the rude little windows in the decayed Cunzie Neuk at the bottom of Candlemakers Row.
He struggled up the rise, made slippery by rain and grime. Then, as the street turned southward in its easy curve, there was some shelter from the house walls. But Auld Jock was quite exhausted and incapable of caring for himself. In the ancient guildhall of the candlemakers, at the top of the Row, was another carting office and Harrow Inn, a resort of country carriers.
When he gained the foot of Candlemakers Row, a crescent of tall, old houses that curved upward around the lower end of Greyfriars kirkyard, water poured upon him from the heavy timbered gallery of the Cunzie Neuk, once the royal mint. The carting office that occupied the street floor was closed, or Auld Jock would have sought shelter there.
At present the supply for the whole world comes from the candlemakers of Europe chiefly France and Germany and, as improved methods of illumination push candles out of the drawing rooms of the wealthier as well as the cabins of the poor, and consequently out of the markets, the production of glycerine naturally grows less.
It was therefore very liable to take fire, especially in foul weather, when the red embers were shaken from the ash-box of the range. He had the rich perquisite of the ship's fat, which went into his slush tubs, to bring him money from the candlemakers. The firewood he used was generally green, if not wet, so that when he lit his fire of a morning, he fumigated the fo'c's'le with bitter smoke.
The distance he had to go was a matter of a quarter of a mile, or less, and the greater part of it was on the level, through the sunken valley of the Grassmarket. But Bobby had literally to drag himself now; and he had still to pull him self up by his fore paws over the wet and greasy cobblestones of Candlemakers Row.
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