t solidly all the time, and made no noise beyond a
husky sort of snoring. But they had a pronounced odour which
penetrated Finn's compartment through a grating near its roof; and
this odour was peculiarly disturbing to the Wolfhound. In the cage
on Finn's left was a full-grown, elderly, and sour-tempered Bengal
tiger, who had sore places under his elbows, and other troubles
which made him excessively irritable, and a bad sleeper. The tiger
also had a pronounced odour; and it was much more disturbing to
Finn than that of the philosophical little native bears. In fact,
it kept the wiry hair over Finn's shoulders in a state of continual
agitation and his silky ears in a restlessly upright position, with
only their soft tips drooping. Sometimes, when the train jolted,
the tiger would roll heavily against the iron-sheathed partition
between his abode and Finn's, and then Finn would spring to his
feet, against the far side of the compartment, every hair on his
body erect, his lips drawn right back from the pearl-white fangs
they usually sheltered, his sensitive nostrils deeply serrated, and
all the forgotten fierceness of bygone generations of Wolfhound
warriors and killers concentrated in his long-drawn snarl of
resentment and of warning threat.

It may be imagined, then, that for Finn the night was even less
restful than the one he spent in Mr. Sandbrook's house. The smells
and sounds about him strained every nerve in the Wolfhound's body
to singing point, even as a prolonged gale strains the cordage of a
ship that flies before it through a heavy sea. They penetrated
farther into the pulsing entity that was Finn than even his
experience with Matey, or his hunting and killing of the fox beside
the Sussex Downs. They stirred latent instincts which came to him
from farther back in the long line of his ancestry; from just how
far back one could not say, but it may well be that they came from
a dim period, beyond all the generations of wolf-hunting and,
earlier, of man-fighting in Ireland, when forbears of Finn's had
been pitted against lions and tigers and bears, as well as Saxons,
in Roman arenas. Again, it might be that that reputed Thibetan
ancestor played his part in endowing Finn with the hitherto
unsuspected instincts which stirred within him now, changing his
aspect from its usual courtly dignity and grace to lip-dropping
ferocity, and fierce, forbidding wrath. It was curious, the manner
in which the play of these inst