in the matter of the great Wolfhound's first experience of the new
land.

But it is a fact that it was not a very happy period for Finn. The
intimate understanding he had acquired regarding the Master's moods
and states of mind and spirits, gave him more than a dog's fair
share of the burdens of that curious period. It was a bad time for
the Master, and for that reason, quite apart from anything else, it
was not a good time for Finn. Some of the evil happenings of that
period Finn understood completely, and with regard to others again,
all that he could understand was their unhappy effect upon his
friends and himself. The first of them saluted Finn's friends
before they left the ship, in the shape of news of the death, one
week before this date, of the one man upon whom the Master had been
relying for help in establishing himself in Australia. So that,
instead of meeting with a warm welcome, Finn and his friends had to
find quarters for themselves, and to spend days in the country
without a friendly word from any one.

The man who had died, suddenly, was a bachelor, and a squatter on a
large scale. His spacious country home was now in the hands of the
representatives of the Crown, pending its disposal for the benefit
of relatives in remote parts of the world who had never seen the
man who made it. This meant that, instead of going up country on
their arrival in Australia, the Master and the Mistress and Finn
were obliged to find economical quarters for themselves in the
city. It was a pleasant, sunny city enough, but no city would ever
commend itself much to an Irish Wolfhound, and cheap town lodgings
formed a poor substitute for the Sussex Downs for one of Finn's
kind. And then, before the situation had ceased to be strange and
unfamiliar, the Master was smitten with an illness which confined
him to one room for several weeks, and kept the Mistress of the
Kennels pretty constantly employed in tending him. If it had not
been for his consciousness of the Master's trouble and weakness,
Finn would have had no great fault to find with this period, for he
was allowed to spend the greater part of his days and nights beside
the bed, and within sight of the man he loved.

But after the Master's recovery came many weeks of anxiety and
increasing depression, during which every sort of misfortune seemed
to pursue Finn's friends, and they were obliged at length to move
into a cheaper, smaller lodging, into which Finn was only a