lling Finn these
things, for though he could understand most things that the Master
said to him, and was able to tell the Master most things that he
wanted to tell; yet the matter of buying and selling and its causes
were naturally beyond him. He had no way of telling that the Master
was in sore straits financially, though he did know that his friend
was not over and above happy. Neither could he tell that the mere
keeping of a Wolfhound like Kathleen runs away with the better part
of twenty pounds a year. Things were not prospering with the
Master, and, feeling that he could not part with Finn or Tara, he
had been absolutely obliged to sell Kathleen.

But that was by no means the end of the Master's troubles, the root
of which lay in the fact that he loved the country, and hated the
town, but was unable to earn money enough in the country to meet
the various obligations with which he saddled himself, and was
saddled by circumstances. And so it fell out that soon after Finn's
second birthday the Master began to spend a good deal of time away
from the house by the Downs. Tara liked to pass the greater part of
her time in the Master's outside den with her muzzle on his
slippers, but Finn was not like that. Tara was a matron getting on
in years, and her matronhood had cost her dear in illness from
which it had been thought she could never recover. Finn, on the
other hand, was the very personification of lusty youth and
tireless virility. The Mistress of the Kennels would take him out
behind her bicycle, while Tara lay dreaming at home, and it may be
that the Mistress fancied her gentle ten and twelve mile runs tired
Finn. She never saw him when he would set off upon his hunting
expeditions, in the course of which he covered every foot of the
Downs for a dozen miles around. He was safe enough, too, for he
would have had nothing but angry growls for any man of Matey's ilk,
charmed he never so wisely with spiced meats and the like. The
weasels and the stoats, and a score of other wild things that
roamed that country-side, could have told the Mistress of the
Kennels just why Finn did not always clear his dinner dish in these
days, and thereby saved her an addition to her many worries of that
period. She did not like to depress the Master with tales of half-eaten
meals, and she had no knowledge of the half-eaten hares and
rabbits and other wild creatures which Finn left behind him on his
hunting trails.

From one point of v