Unable to bear these things any longer, Finn turned cautiously toward the middle of his loathsome prison, and, though his feet shrank from the task, scraped a hollow place in its midst of about the bigness of a wash-hand basin. Then, treading as though upon hot bricks, he squirmed his great body round to avoid touching the walls of his prison, and sat on his haunches in the hollow he had made. He was now filled with a desire to inform Tara and the Master, and, it may be, the rest of the world, about his sorry plight. But, particularly, he wanted to let the Master and Tara know about it. And so, seated there in what he had endeavoured to make the one approachably clean spot available, Finn pointed his long muzzle toward the stars he could not see, and, opening his jaws wide, expelled from them the true Irish Wolfhound howl, which seemed to tear its way outward and upward from the very centre of the hound's grief-smitten heart, to wind slowly through his lungs and throat, and to reach the outer air with very much the effect of a big steamship's syren in a dense fog. It is a very long-drawn cry, beginning away down in the bass, dragging up slowly to an anguished treble note in a very minor key, and subsiding, despairingly, about half-way back to the bass. It is a sound that carries a very long way--though not so far as from the place of Finn's captivity to the Sussex Downs--and carries misery with it just as far as ever it can reach. Upon the hearer who has any bowels of compassion it falls with a weight of physical appeal which may not be denied. Above all, it is a strange, mysterious, uncanny cry, and not a sound which can be ignored. It is a sound to fetch you hurriedly from your bed at midnight; and that though you had been sunk in dreamless sleep when first it smote its irresistible way into your consciousness.