iven his glimpse of a big marsupial in the act of taking a
fifteen-foot leap through the scrub. Finn almost sat down on his
haunches from astonishment. But, unlike the snake, the wallaby
inspired him with no sort of fear, possibly by reason of its
evident fear of him. It was, however, another item in the
strangeness, the complete unfamiliarity of Finn's present
surroundings.

It seems absurd to suggest that the great Wolfhound may have been
suffering from loneliness, seeing that he had never been so
thankful for anything else in his whole life as he was for his
escape from the circus, with its small army of men-folk and
animals. But it is a fact that as Finn plodded along through the
wild bush to the south of Tinnaburra, he began to be haunted by a
sense of isolation and friendlessness. It was now thirty hours
since he had tasted food, and it seemed that game shunned his
trail, for he saw none of the many small animals he had passed on
the previous night; and the sight he had had that day of the great
wedge-tailed eagle, of the carpet snake, and of the grey rock
wallaby, these only added to the uncanny strangeness of his
surroundings. In one sense, persecution, witting and unwitting, had
made a wild beast of him during his confinement in the circus; but,
by reason of the close confinement which had accompanied these
persecutions, increasing self-dependence and self-reliance had not
come with the access of fierceness and wildness. Finn inherited
fighting instincts and savage ferocity under persecution from a
long and noble line of hunting and fighting ancestors. But he
inherited few instincts which bore practically upon the matter of
picking up his own living, of walking alone, of depending
exclusively upon himself, and of leading the solitary life of the
really wild carnivora. But this would have troubled him very little
if the scene of his present wanderings had been, say, some part of
Sussex. As it was, the big snake, the huge eagle, the screaming
cockatoo, the nerve-shaking cachophony of the jackass, and the
half-flying progress of the big wallaby, all combined with the huge
wildness of the country and its vegetation to oppress Finn with the
sense of being a lone outcast, an outlier in a foreign land which
was full of sinister possibilities. The recollection of that
hissing nine-foot worm, of a thickness as great and greater than
that of his own legs, lingered unpleasantly with Finn. Also, he was
getting very hung