m. He had gathered, so the local story ran, something like two hundred
pounds, and he made an incautious brag of this fact in the bar-room of
the old "Blue Posts," at Smethwick. Midway up Roebuck Lane, which was
then without a house from end to end, three men sprang out upon him
from the shadows of the bridge then just newly-erected across the Great
Western line of railway, over which, if I remember rightly, no train at
that time had ever travelled.

Then that pork butcher proved himself a paladin. He thrust one of his
assailants to the rails at the bottom of the cutting with his foot;
he laid out another upon the pathway with one prodigious buffet; and,
seizing the third by the coat collar, he kicked him half a mile to the
police station. Even now, I believe this story to be true, or near the
truth; and the sympathetic reader may fancy what we boys made of
the hero of it. I have worshipped many people in my time, and I have
thrilled at the thought of many splendid deeds; but I have never since
reached that high-water mark of hero-worship at which I sailed when
I followed that pork butcher down the West Bromwich High Street, and
persuaded myself beyond the evidence of my senses that he was ten feet
high.

CHAPTER III

My Father's Printing Office--The Prize Ring--The Fistic Art--
First Steps in Education--A Boy's Reading--Carlyle--Parents
and Children--A School Chum--Technical Education--Plaster
Medallions.

At the age of twelve I was taken from school and set to work in my
father's printing office. There must have been a serious fall in the
family fortunes about this time, for a year earlier I had been removed
from the respectable little private seminary I had hitherto attended
and transferred to a school of the roughest sort, where the pupils paid
threepence a week apiece to the schoolmaster and we used to give off the
result of our lessons in platoons. I learned a little freehand drawing
here in the South Kensington manner, for we had a night school which was
affiliated to the Art department there, and our teachers came to us once
a week from Birmingham. I was secretly very unhappy all this time, and
brooded much on the disguised prince idea among my rough companions.

My way to school led me past the Champion of England public-house, kept
by the Tipton Slasher--William Perry, from whom Tom Sayers afterwards
wrested the honours of the Prize Ring. I got to know that knock-kneed
giant wel