ry.

While these impressions were sinking into the Wolfhound's mind, the
country through which he was travelling was becoming more open,
more like a long-neglected park, in which many of the trees were
dead, and all had a gaunt and scraggy look, with their thin,
pointed grey-green leaves, their curiously tortured-looking limbs,
and their long, rustling streamers of decaying bark. But, however
Finn might feel in the matter of loneliness, it was with a pang of
something like horror that he came presently upon a barbed wire
fence, exactly like the one he had leaped on the previous night,
directly after leaving the circus. Could it be possible that the
circus had been moved during the day to this place, and the barbed
wire fence brought with it? Finn prowled cautiously up and down
that fence for a couple of hundred yards in each direction, peering
beyond it, and sniffing and listening with the extreme of
suspiciousness, before he finally leaped the wire and continued his
way in a south-easterly direction.

Five minutes later he saw a rabbit, and though he lost it, by
reason of the fact that it was sitting within a foot of its burrow
and disappeared with lightning-like rapidity at sight of Finn, yet
he was cheered by this homely sight, and pursued his way with
renewed hope in the matter of supper. A moment later and he stopped
dead in his tracks as though shot, and then crawled softly aside to
take cover behind a thicket of scrub.

In topping an abrupt little ridge, he had come suddenly into full
view of a bark gunyah or shanty, in the triangular opening of
which, beside a bright fire, sat a man and a big black hound. A
billy-can swung over the fire on a tripod of stakes, and the man
was engaged with his supper. Finn did not know, of course, that the
man was a boundary-rider, and his dog a not very well-bred
kangaroo-hound. The wind was north-west, or the kangaroo-hound
would surely have scented Finn's approach and given tongue.

For a long time Finn lay under the cover of his thicket, peering
through the darkness at the boundary-rider and his dog. And while
Finn gazed his thoughts were very busy, both with matters of his
own knowledge and experience, and with vague instinctive knowledge,
dream knowledge and dream experiences, which came to him from his
forbears of old, even as a setter's or a pointer's hunting
knowledge comes to him in the vanguard of experience. The thing
that most impressed Finn in the picture he sa