ge bulk and
strength, Finn was one of the gentlest and most docile of created
things, whose silence and tractability a little child could and
would have brought about with the greatest ease, and without so
much as an angry word. And, so, one has to admit that Matey's
cruelty was like nine-tenths of the other cruelty in the world,
alike among the educated and the uneducated, in that it was due to
ignorance and stupidity.

For a long time Finn was conscious of nothing but fear, and pain,
and misery. He really had been very badly handled, and, though he
knew it not, one of his ribs was broken. After an hour or two, he
became perfectly silent, and began, tentatively and in a half-hearted
way, to lick some of his bruises and abrasions. Then, before
this task was half accomplished, wise Nature asserted her claims,
and the exhausted Wolfhound fell into a fitful sleep just before
daybreak. When he woke, fully a couple of hours later, much of
his pain and misery remained with him; but the fear had given
place to other feelings, chief among which came the determination
to escape from the dominion of Matey. His own short experience of
life gave Finn nothing to draw upon in coping with the situation in
which he now found himself. He was drawing now, not upon teaching
or experience, but upon what we call instinct: the store of
concentrated inherited experience with which Nature furnishes all
created things, and some more richly than others. Deep down in
Finn's share of this store there were faint stirrings in the
direction of hatred and vengeance; but of these, Finn was not
actually conscious as yet. What he was acutely conscious of was the
determination with which instinct supplied him to seize the very
first opportunity of getting clear away from his present
environment, and from Matey. So much, instinct taught him: that he
must get his freedom if he could, and that he must never, never
again, for one moment, trust Matey. This was only the surface of
the lesson instinct taught him. There was a lot more in the lesson
which would permanently affect Finn's attitude toward humans and
toward life itself. But the surface was the immediate thing; to win
to freedom, and never to trust Matey again.

The first result of Finn's lesson was that he examined the whole of
his prison very carefully, by the aid chiefly of his sense of smell
and touch. There was hardly any light in the place. His nose was
very sore, because Matey's stick had kn