It was now thirty hours since Finn had tasted food, and three days since he had eaten a proper meal. If his experiences of the past four-and-twenty hours had been in every other respect distressing, they had at least robbed him of grief about the Master. His outraged physical senses, and the tremendous strain placed upon his nervous system, effectually shut grief out from his mind. Finn was accustomed to have meals served to him in spotless enamelled dishes, and it had always been food of which a man might have partaken: well-cooked meats, bread, vegetables, and gravy, nicely cut and mixed. Now for a long time the condition of passionate protest and irritability produced in him by all that he had gone through, and by Killer's continuous growling, prevented his touching the meat which lay near the bars of his cage. But hunger triumphed after a while, and with a quick, rather furtive movement, but with lips drawn back and every sign exposed of readiness to defend his action, Finn lifted the big chunk of meat from its place by the bars, and carried it into a corner at the back of the cage, where he tore it into fragments, and ate it, of necessity, very much as a wolf eats, the blood of the raw meat trickling meanwhile about his jaws. To drink, Finn had to place his head close to those bars which most nearly adjoined the front of the tiger's cage. But drink was necessary to him now, and so, with his nose all furrowed, his fangs bared, and a formidable low snarl issuing from his throat, he slowly approached the water-pan, and lapped his fill, pausing to snarl aloud at the tiger between each three or four laps of his tongue. But Killer had fed full, and crunched his bone to splinters and eaten that; so now he was preparing himself to sleep. If Finn could have followed Killer's example and slept it would have helped him immensely, for his overwrought system needed rest more badly than anything else just then. But this was impossible as yet for the sensitive Wolfhound. The two bears in the next cage were playing together fubsily, and the tiger's breathing while he slept was a maddening kind of cross between a purr and a snore; maddening, that is, to one who found the creature's mere proximity incredibly distasteful. This hatred of the Killer's neighbourhood was no whim, no personal fastidiousness on Finn's part. It went much deeper than that. For example, so far, the hair on Finn's back would not assume its natural position; it still stood half erect, and harsh and stiff as fine wire; by which the tension of his nerves may be imagined. No, Finn could not sleep. The hours of the day dragged slowly by, and Finn began to suffer in new ways. He had never been confined for any length of time before, and strict cleanliness was an instinct with him.