ft to rest upon
his laurels, surely.

He was dying when I saw him again, and his vast chest and shoulders were
shrunken and bowed, so that one wondered where the very framework of the
giant man had fallen to. He was despised and forgotten and left alone,
and he sat on the side of his bed with an aspect altogether dejected
and heartless. In his better days he had liked what he used to call 'a
stripe of white satin,' which was the poetic for a glass of Old Tom gin.
I carried a bottle of that liquor with me as a peace-offering, and a
quarter of a pound of bird's-eye. He did not know me, and there was no
speculation in his look; but after a drink he brightened. When I entered
the room he sat in he was twirling an empty clay with a weary listless
thumb and finger, and the tobacco was welcome.

'They mought ha' let me aloon,' he told me, when his wits grew clear,
'I'd held the belt for seventeen 'ear,' (I think he said seventeen, but
'Fistiana' is not at hand, and I can but make a guess at memory.) 'They
mought ha' let me aloon. Turn's a good un. I've sin 'em all, an' I've
niver sin a better. But he owed to ha' let me be. Theer was no credit to
be got in hommerin' a man at my time o' life. All the same, mind ye, I
thowt I should ha' trounced him. So I should if I could ha' got at
him; but he fled hither an' he fled thither, and he was about me like a
cooper a-walkin' round a cask. An' I was fule enough to lose temper,
an' the crowd begun to laugh an' gibe at me, an' I took to raeacin'
round after him, an' my wind went, an' wheer was I then? He knocked me
down--fair an' square he did it. Th' on'y time it iver chanced to me. I
put everythin' I had o' that fight, an' here I bin.'

It will be within the memory of such as care for these things that,
after the last great battle which brought the fistic history of England
to a glorious close, Tom Sayers and the Benicia Boy, his late opponent,
enlisted with Messrs. Howes and Cushing, proprietors of a circus
in those days, and travelled the country, sparring nightly in amity
together. My father, who had naturally about as much sympathy with
the Prize-Ring as with the atrocities of the King of Dahomey, was
nevertheless fired with admiration for the hero of Farnborough, and must
needs go to see him. He astonished everybody who knew him by showing his
silver head and whiskers in the bar parlour of the hotel at which Mr.
Sayers was quartered for the night I suppose that the worshippers