Wallaby Bill was pleasantly interested in watching this amiable performance, but it would have impressed him vastly more if he could have pictured to himself the sort of spectacle Finn had presented a couple of days before, when, with foaming jaws, gleaming fangs, raised hackles, and straining limbs, the great Wolfhound had pitted himself, with roaring fury, against the leather-coated man who wielded the hot iron. To an observer who had known of this, there would have been something at once rather pathetic and a good deal grotesque about Finn's present kittenish play with Jess. To lend verisimilitude to the game Finn had to growl low down in his throat at intervals, while Jess snarled and barked; but when Finn laid one paw on the kangaroo-hound's curved back, as he frequently did at different phases of the game, his touch, for all his huge bulk and weight, was one that would not have incommoded a new-born pup. The Wolfhound was deft and agile enough, despite his want of practice in such occupations, but yet, by reason of his great size, and the hard-bitten, fighting look which the last few months had given him, and the extreme wariness of his continuous observation of the reclining Bill; because of these things, there was more than a hint of grotesqueness about his gambols, such as one could not find in the antics of his playmate. Her sex, her smoothness, her smaller size and greater slimness of build, combined with her evidently complete domestication, made Jess's foolery sit naturally upon her; and, indeed, her movements were without exception graceful in the extreme. Wallaby Bill's pipe had burned itself out before the hounds tired of their play and stretched themselves upon the ground, Jess lying a good yard and a half nearer to the fire than Finn ventured. But Finn moved only very slightly now, when Bill rose slowly to his feet and stretched his arms, while taking careful observations of the new-comer. In the bright firelight, he was just able to make out the bigger among Finn's scars, where the Professor's iron had burned through the Wolfhound's wiry coat. Finn half rose, with ears cocked, and muscles ready for the spring, when Bill yawned and said--