nce been driven
himself, under a shower of sticks and stones, from a village of
mountain-bred Moors who saw through his disguise. This being
driven, hunted, shooed out into the open with blows and curses and
scornful maledictions, is a singularly cowing sensation, at once
humiliating and embittering. It is unlike any other kind of hostile
treatment. It affected Finn more deeply and powerfully than any
punishment could have affected him. Though infinitely less painful
and terrible than the sort of interviews he had had with the
Professor in his circus prison, it yet bit deeper into his soul, in
a way; it produced an impression at least equally profound. He
desired none of man's society, and during all the time that he had
regarded the camp in that clearing as his home, he had never sought
anything at man's hands, nor approached man more nearly than a
distance of a dozen paces or so. But now he was savagely given to
understand that even the neighbourhood of the camp was no place for
him; that it was forbidden ground for him. He was driven out into
the wild with contumely, and with the contemptuous sting of the
blow of something flung at him. It was no longer a case of man
courting him, while he carefully maintained an attitude of reserve
and kept his distance. Man had set the distance, and definitely
pronounced him an alien; driven him off. Man was actively hostile
to him, would fling something at him on sight. Man declared war on
him, and drove him out into the wild. Well, and what of the wild?

The wild yielded him unlimited food and unlimited interest. The
wild was clean and free; it hampered him in no way; it had offered
no sort of hostile demonstration against him. Nay, in a sense, the
wild had paid court to him, shown him great deference, bowed down
before him, and granted him instant lordship. (If Finn thought at
all just now of the snake people, it was of the large non-venomous
kind, of which he had slain several.) Altogether, it was with a
curiously disturbed and divided mind, in which bitterness and
resentment were uppermost, that the Wolfhound gazed now at the man
sitting in the firelight by Bill's gunyah. And then, while he
gazed, there rose up in him kindly thoughts and feelings regarding
Jess, when she had played with him beside that fire; regarding
Bill, when he had talked at Finn in his own friendly admiring way,
and tossed the Wolfhound food, food which Finn had always eaten
with an appearance of zest a