He sketched the scene in Haddo's Hole, where the tenement bairns
poured out as pure a gift of love and mercy and self-sacrifice as
had ever been laid at the foot of a Scottish altar. He told of the
search for the lately ransomed and lost terrier, by the lavish use
of oil and candles; of Bobby's coming down Castle Rock in the fog,
battered and bruised for a month's careful tending by an old Heriot
laddie. His feet still showed the scars of that perilous descent.
He himself, remorseful, had gone with the Biblereader from the
Medical Mission in the Cowgate to the dormer-lighted closet in
College Wynd, where Auld Jock had died. Now he described the
classic fireplace of white freestone, with its boxed-in bed, where
the Pentland shepherd lay like some effigy on a bier, with the wee
guardian dog stretched on the flagged hearth below.
"What a subject for a monument!" The Grand Leddy looked across the
top of the slope at the sleeping Skye. "I suppose there is no
portrait of Bobby."
"Ay, your Leddyship; I have a drawing in the dining rooms, sketched
by Mr. Daniel Maclise. He was here a year or twa ago, just before
his death, doing some commission, and often had his tea in my bit
place. I told him Bobby's story, and he made the sketch for me as a
souvenir of his veesit."
"I am sure you prize it, Mr. Traill. Mr. Maclise was a talented
artist, but he was not especially an animal painter. There really
is no one since Landseer paints no more.
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