e authorities had refused to allow the boss to come closer in,
and so one side of his camping-place was walled by virgin bush; a
dense tract of blue-gum and iron-bark stretching, almost as far as
the eye could reach, to the foot-hills of a gaunt mountain range.
For a mile or so from the circus camp the trees had all been
ring-barked a couple of seasons or more before this time, with the
result that they were now the very haggard skeletons of mighty
trees, naked for the most part, their white bones open to all the
winds of heaven, but here and there sporting a ghastly kind of
drapery, remnants of their grave-clothes as it might be, in the
shape of long hanging streamers of dead bark, which moaned and
rustled eerily in the night breezes. High above the tattered
grave-clothes of their lifeless trunks, the knotted, tortured-looking
arms and fingers of the trees groped painfully after the life that
had fled their neighbourhood.

Finn could just see the ghostly extremities of these spectral trees
over the top of the main tent as he lay crouched in his corner,
after devoting an hour to the licking of his sores. Presently, an
almost full moon rose among the trees' fleshless limbs, and painted
their nakedness in more than ever ghostly guise. It was then that
Finn rose, painfully and slowly, to his feet, and moved, like an
old, old man, across the floor of his cage to the bars, the bars
that were of an inky blackness in that silvery light. For almost an
hour this great hound, this tortured prince of a kingly race, stood
sadly there, staring out at the moonlight between the bars of his
prison; and for almost an hour, big clear drops kept forming in his
black eyes and trickling along his scarred muzzle, till they
pattered down upon the floor of the cage. If he had ever heard of
such a thing as suicide, it may be that his soul would have known
the final humiliation of self-destruction that night. But there is
something that strikes a balance, as well in a Wolfhound's life as
a man's life.

Near as Finn was to the limit of his endurance, his brave spirit
lived within him yet, and he did not forego the nightly habit he
had formed long since of trying the bars that made him a prisoner.
It is possible that there never was a much more pathetically
forlorn hope than that which animated this sorely racked prisoner
when he felt his bars. But if the iron of them had entered into his
soul, then it had made for endurance. The process was no