Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 26, 2025
The yellow gas-light gave his face such a sardonic aspect that Sandy turned pale. "Wha's death, man?" Mr. Traill kept his own counsel, but at the door he turned: "You'll no' be remembering the bittie terrier that lived in the kirkyard?" The light of boyhood days broke in Sandy's grin. "Ay, I'll no' be forgetting the sonsie tyke. He was a deil of a dog to tak' on a holiday.
Bobby had insisted upon being let out of the lodge kitchen, and had spent the morning near Auld Jock's grave and in nosing about neighboring slabs and thorn bushes. When the time-gun boomed he trotted to the gate quite openly and waited there inside the wicket. In such nipping weather there were no visitors to the kirkyard and the gate was not opened.
Did you take a sudden longing to see the old place? 'No; that was not my object at all. You will know what it was some day. Now we'll go to the inn and get something to eat while they get our machine ready. See, there's the old kirk; there's a lot of famous folk buried in that kirkyard. We'd better go in, and I'll show you where I want to be laid.
At that the little dog slipped under the fallen table-tomb and lay hidden there until any strange visitor had taken himself away. Except for two more forced returns and ingenious escapes from the sheepfarm on the Pentlands, Bobby had lived in the kirkyard undisturbed for six months.
But he stood there at last, after the jolliest romp, in which the old kirkyard rang with laughter, and oh! so bonny, in his rippling coat of dark silver. No sooner was he released than he dashed around the kirk and back again, bringing his latest bone in his mouth.
Still the lift gloomed, and the wind roared, and it was as doleful a sight as ever was seen in any town afflicted with calamity, to see the sailors' wives, with their red cloaks about their heads, followed by their hirpling and disconsolate bairns, going one after another to the kirkyard, to look at the vessels where their helpless breadwinners were battling with the tempest.
John Traill, and four doors beyond the kirkyard gate, was a cozy little inglenook that Auld Jock and Bobby had come to look upon as their own. At its back, above a recessed oaken settle and a table, a tiny paned window looked up and over a retaining wall into the ancient place of the dead.
Soon after Carlyle died I went to Ecclefechan and stood by his grave. It was not a day that I would have chosen for such an errand, for it was cold, grey, and hard, and towards the afternoon it rained a slow, persistent, wintry rain. The kirkyard in Ecclefechan was dismal and depressing, but my thoughts were not there.
Edinburgh had so many shaggy little Skye and Scotch terriers that one more could go about unremarked. Bobby returned to the kirkyard at his own good pleasure. In the evening he was given a supper of porridge and broo, or milk, at the kitchen door of the lodge, and the nights he spent on Auld Jock's grave.
It cleared the roofs of the tallest, oldest houses that swarmed up the steep banks from the Cowgate, and ran on, by easy descent, to the main gateway of Greyfriars kirkyard at the lower top of the southern rise. Greyfriars' two kirks formed together, under one continuous roof, a long, low, buttressed building without tower or spire.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking