A
little dog, traveling with his nose low, lives in another stratum
of the world, and experiences other pleasures than his master.
He has excitements that he does his best to share, and that send
him flying in pursuit of phantom clues.
From the top of the Burghmuir it was easy going to Bobby. The
snow had gone off in a thaw, releasing a multitude of autumnal
aromas. There was a smell of birch and beech buds sealed up in
gum, of berries clotted on the rowan-trees, and of balsam and
spice from plantations of Highland firs and larches. The babbling
water of the burn was scented with the dead bracken of glens down
which it foamed. Even the leafless hedges had their woody odors,
and stone dykes their musty smell of decaying mosses and lichens.
Bobby knew the pause at the toll-bar in the valley, and the mixed
odors of many passing horses and men, there. He knew the smells
of poultry and cheese at a dairy-farm; of hunting dogs and
riding-leathers at a sportsman's trysting inn, and of grist and
polluted water at a mill. And after passing the hilltop toll-bar
of Fairmilehead, dipping across a narrow valley and rounding the
base of a sentinel peak, many tame odors were left behind. At the
buildings of the large, scattered farms there were smells of
sheep, and dogs and barn yards. But, for the most part, after the
road began to climb over a high shoulder of the range, there was
just one wild tang of heather and gorse and fern, tingling with
salt air from the German Ocean.
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