ing with the
Master, months before.

Slowly, and with only a little less caution than before, Finn now
approached the camp a second time, and heard Bill say to the
kangaroo-hound: "All right, Jess; go to him, then!" In another
moment, Jess came prancing out towards him, and Finn spread out his
fore-legs and lowered his great frame to the earth, while his
hind-quarters remained erect and ready for a pivoting movement. This
was the precise attitude that old Tara, the most gracious lady of her
race, had adopted toward Finn and his brothers and sisters, years
ago in the orchard beside the Sussex Downs, when Finn was still an
unweaned pup, and Tara came to play with him, without a notion that
she was his mother. (Finn's loving little foster-mother, it will be
remembered, had been safely shut up, out of hearing and scent of
the pups.) Jess now imitated Finn's attitude, and when his nose had
almost touched hers she bounded from him sideways and backwards,
sometimes wheeling completely round, and barking with pretended
ferocity, till she stooped again and repeated the process.

Wallaby Bill was pleasantly interested in watching this amiable
performance, but it would have impressed him vastly more if he
could have pictured to himself the sort of spectacle Finn had
presented a couple of days before, when, with foaming jaws,
gleaming fangs, raised hackles, and straining limbs, the great
Wolfhound had pitted himself, with roaring fury, against the
leather-coated man who wielded the hot iron. To an observer who had
known of this, there would have been something at once rather
pathetic and a good deal grotesque about Finn's present kittenish
play with Jess. To lend verisimilitude to the game Finn had to
growl low down in his throat at intervals, while Jess snarled and
barked; but when Finn laid one paw on the kangaroo-hound's curved
back, as he frequently did at different phases of the game, his
touch, for all his huge bulk and weight, was one that would not
have incommoded a new-born pup. The Wolfhound was deft and agile
enough, despite his want of practice in such occupations, but yet,
by reason of his great size, and the hard-bitten, fighting look
which the last few months had given him, and the extreme wariness
of his continuous observation of the reclining Bill; because of
these things, there was more than a hint of grotesqueness about his
gambols, such as one could not find in the antics of his playmate.
Her sex, her smooth