It may be that a good deal of the wisdom and philosophy of mankind is born of grief and suffering. It is certain that a good deal of philosophy came to Finn as the aftermath of that evening upon which he retired, heart-broken, to the farthest corner of his cage, after seeing the Master and the Mistress of the Kennels pass him without a word or a glance. His mind did not deal in niceties. He did not tell himself that if the Master had only guessed at his presence there, all would have been different. He was conscious only of the apparently brutal fact that the Master had walked past his cage and ignored him; left him there in his horrible confinement. He bore no malice, for there was not any malice in his nature; which is not at all the same thing as saying that he was incapable of wreaking vengeance or administering punishment. He simply was smitten to the very heart with grief and sorrow. And so he lay, all through that night, silent, sorrowful, and blind to his surroundings.
The natural result was that sleep came to him after a while, when all was dark and silent, and the folk who had visited the circus, like those who had entertained them, were in their beds. And this sleep he badly needed. While he slept the burns on his muzzle and ear were healing, the searing heat of his grief was subsiding, and his body and nervous system were adapting themselves to his situation, and recharging themselves after the great drain which had been made upon them during the past couple of days.
When Killer's long, snarling yawn woke Finn in the morning he did not fling himself against the partition which hid the tiger from him. He did not even bark or snarl a defiant reply. He only bared his white fangs in silence, and breathed somewhat harshly through his nostrils, while the hair over his shoulders rose a little in token of instinctive resentment. This comparatively mild demonstration cost Finn a great deal less in the way of expenditure of vitality than his previous day's reception of the tiger's snarls; and left him by just so much the better fitted to cope with other ordeals that lay before him.
If Finn had been a wild beast, his experience in the Southern Cross Circus would have been a far less trying one for him than it was. He would have learned early that the Professor was a practically all-powerful tyrant, who had to be obeyed because he had the power and the will to inflict great suffering upon those of the wild kindred who refused him obedience. That he was a tyrant and an enemy the wild creature would have accepted from the outset, as a natural and an inevitable fact. In Finn's case the matter was far otherwise. His instinct and inclination bade him regard a man as a probable friend. Naturally, if the Professor had been aware of this, he would never have approached Finn with a hot iron, and their relations would have been quite different from the beginning. As it was, or as Finn saw it, anyhow, the Professor had proved himself a creature absolutely beyond the pale; a mad wild beast, disguised as a man; a devil who met friendly advances with repeated blows of a magic weapon, a stick made of fire, against which no living thing might stand. Matey had seemed to Finn a mad man, and one to be avoided. But Matey had not been a wild beast as well, neither had he carried fire in his hand. The Professor was a far more formidable and deadly creature. However he might disguise his intentions, his purpose clearly was Finn's destruction. That was how Finn saw it, and he acted accordingly; consistently, and not from malice, but upon the dictates of common sense and self-preservation, as he understood them.