Purpose and Success

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Why Pat Wore the V. C. If ever you should go to Edinburgh, undoubtedly you will climb a long, steep street to the castle; and there you may see a very interesting thing which is not mentioned in the guidebooks. As you stand upon the King's Bastion, looking down over the beautiful city, drop your eyes upon a little triangular bit of the great rock just outside the wall you are leaning on. You will be surprised to find a tiny garden upon this narrow coign of vantage. It is full of bright flowers, yet it is not all a garden; for behind the flowers stands a row of modest gravestones, brown and gray, with an inscription upon each. The stones are far too small to record human virtues, and you see at once that they must be put there in honor of a race which cannot speak for itself. So they are; they mark the resting-place of good dogs once living in garrison here, and each is the memorial of a faithful life. There are eight or ten of these stones, and each one has its story; but read first the inscription on the stone in the right- hand corner. It runs as follows: To this scanty record I shall add one chapter of a most stirring life. To begin at the beginning, I must own that Pat, like some other heroes, had no satisfactory family tree. Judging from his portrait in oil, which was to be seen at the Naval and Military Exhibition in Edinburgh in 1889, I should say he came of many families. There is a dispute about his pedigree, but no one denies that he had a great deal of bulldog blood, and an equal part of pug. Though not wholly a blue-blood, he was allied to the aristocracy on both sides. His early life is also wrapped in mystery; he was a full- grown dog when he followed the boys in from parade one bright morning, and no subsequent inquiry ever unlocked the...