three
or four of its graceful branches at a height of three feet from the
ground. Finn eyed this inviting spot steadily for two or three
minutes, while his aching sides continued to heave, and his long
tongue to sway from one side of his jaws. Then he stepped
cautiously into the sheltered nook, turned completely round in it
three or four times, and finally sank to rest there in a compact
coil, and with a little grunt of contentment and relief.

Finn opened his eyes, and half-opened them, many times during the
day; once, to his utter amazement, when a huge wedge-tailed eagle
swept gloriously past with a lamb in its talons no more than ten
feet from his nose; but the day was practically done, and nightfall
approaching, when the Wolfhound finally rose from his sandy bed and
stretched his seven-foot length from nose to tail. The long stretch
drew a sharp whine from him towards its end, when the stiffness and
soreness of his limbs, and of some of his more recent burns and
bruises, found him out. But even in the pain there was a sense of
luxury and gladness for Finn. His sleep had not been devoid of
sudden starts, of shudderings and twitches, born of fearful
dreaming; but now that he was broad awake, and in the hushed grey
twilight looked out across forty miles of wild open land, with
never a sign of tent or house, or other work of man, his heart
swelled within him with satisfaction and content, and he drew deep
breaths of grateful pleasure and relief before setting out upon the
descent of Tinnaburra, and, if it might be, the capture of a
supper.

Before Finn had travelled half a mile along the hill-side, he made
his first acquaintance with the snake people. In descending at a
sharp angle from the side of a fallen tree, his fore-feet just
scraped the end of the tail of a nine-foot carpet snake, whose
colouring was vivid and fresh. Before Finn knew what had happened,
one coil of the sinuous reptile's body was about his left hind-leg,
and, as the startled Wolfhound wheeled in his tracks, the big
snake's head rose at him with a forbidding, long-drawn "Ps-s-s-s-t!"
of defiance. The rapidly tightening pressure about his muscular
lower thigh produced something like panic in Finn's breast; but,
luckily enough, his panic resulted in speeding him toward precisely
the right course of action. He feinted in the direction of his
hind-leg, and then, as the snake plunged for his neck, his jaws
flashed back and caught the reptile just be