world, about his sorry
plight. But, particularly, he wanted to let the Master and Tara
know about it. And so, seated there in what he had endeavoured to
make the one approachably clean spot available, Finn pointed his
long muzzle toward the stars he could not see, and, opening his
jaws wide, expelled from them the true Irish Wolfhound howl, which
seemed to tear its way outward and upward from the very centre of
the hound's grief-smitten heart, to wind slowly through his lungs
and throat, and to reach the outer air with very much the effect of
a big steamship's syren in a dense fog. It is a very long-drawn
cry, beginning away down in the bass, dragging up slowly to an
anguished treble note in a very minor key, and subsiding,
despairingly, about half-way back to the bass. It is a sound that
carries a very long way--though not so far as from the place of
Finn's captivity to the Sussex Downs--and carries misery with it
just as far as ever it can reach. Upon the hearer who has any
bowels of compassion it falls with a weight of physical appeal
which may not be denied. Above all, it is a strange, mysterious,
uncanny cry, and not a sound which can be ignored. It is a sound to
fetch you hurriedly from your bed at midnight; and that though you
had been sunk in dreamless sleep when first it smote its
irresistible way into your consciousness.

Finn was beginning the bass rumble of his sixth howl when the door
of his prison was flung suddenly open, and he saw Matey, armed with
a hurricane lamp and a short, heavy stick. He was still so new to
the ways of Matey's kind of human, that he thought his howls had
brought him release, and, for an instant, he even had a vision of a
deep basin of cold water, a meal, and a sweet, clean bed, which his
innocent fancy told him Matey might have been engaged in preparing
for him. If he had not been so loath to risk touching the walls of
his prison, his powerful tail would have wagged as the door opened
and the clean night air came in to him. As it was, he leaned
forward to express his gratitude for the opening of the door. And
as he moved forward, delicately, Matey's stick descended on his
nose, with all the weight of Matey's arm and Matey's savage anger
behind it. There was no more sensitive or vulnerable spot in the
whole of Finn's anatomy, physically or morally. The blow was
hideously painful, hideously unexpected, hideously demoralizing. It
robbed Finn of sight, and sense, and self-respect, a