Matey certainly could not be called a clever dog stealer, because he had no notion of how to preserve that which he stole. Putting aside their brutality, his methods were incredibly stupid; but when, five minutes later, he lay listening in his bed, the only reflection that his stupid mind brought him was that he had succeeded admirably. No further sound came from the walled-in yard; and it appeared that there was to be no further risk of neighbours being disturbed by howls from Finn. Matey was too far away to hear anything of the low, tremulous, nasal whimpering which trickled out into the night through the holes in the door of Finn's prison; and, in any case, there was no fear of that small sound disturbing any one. So, after his own fashion--which one really hesitates to call brutal, because brutes rarely, and probably never, indulge in pointless, unnecessary ferocity--Matey had been successful. But if Matey had had sense enough to be called a clever dog-stealer, he would have recognised that, despite his huge bulk and strength, Finn was one of the gentlest and most docile of created things, whose silence and tractability a little child could and would have brought about with the greatest ease, and without so much as an angry word. And, so, one has to admit that Matey's cruelty was like nine-tenths of the other cruelty in the world, alike among the educated and the uneducated, in that it was due to ignorance and stupidity. For a long time Finn was conscious of nothing but fear, and pain, and misery. He really had been very badly handled, and, though he knew it not, one of his ribs was broken. After an hour or two, he became perfectly silent, and began, tentatively and in a half-hearted way, to lick some of his bruises and abrasions. Then, before this task was half accomplished, wise Nature asserted her claims, and the exhausted Wolfhound fell into a fitful sleep just before daybreak. When he woke, fully a couple of hours later, much of his pain and misery remained with him; but the fear had given place to other feelings, chief among which came the determination to escape from the dominion of Matey. His own short experience of life gave Finn nothing to draw upon in coping with the situation in which he now found himself. He was drawing now, not upon teaching or experience, but upon what we call instinct: the store of concentrated inherited experience with which Nature furnishes all created things, and some more richly than others. Deep down in Finn's share of this store there were faint stirrings in the direction of hatred and vengeance; but of these, Finn was not actually conscious as yet. What he was acutely conscious of was the determination with which instinct supplied him to seize the very first opportunity of getting clear away from his present environment, and from Matey. So much, instinct taught him: that he must get his freedom if he could, and that he must never, never again, for one moment, trust Matey.