some
confusion; which people who ought to have known better have wrought into
subject of quarrelling. By birth it is true, and cannot be denied,
that I am a man of Somerset; nevertheless by breed I am, as well as by
education, a son of Devon also. And just as both of our two counties
vowed that Glen Doone was none of theirs, but belonged to the other
one; so now, each with hot claim and jangling (leading even to blows
sometimes), asserted and would swear to it (as I became more famous)
that John Ridd was of its own producing, bred of its own true blood, and
basely stolen by the other.

Now I have not judged it in any way needful or even becoming and
delicate, to enter into my wrestling adventures, or describe my
progress. The whole thing is so different from Lorna, and her gentle
manners, and her style of walking; moreover I must seem (even to kind
people) to magnify myself so much, or at least attempt to do it, that I
have scratched out written pages, through my better taste and sense.

Neither will I, upon this head, make any difference even now; being
simply betrayed into mentioning the matter because bare truth requires
it, in the tale of Lorna's fortunes.

For a mighty giant had arisen in a part of Cornwall: and his calf was
twenty-five inches round, and the breadth of his shoulders two feet
and a quarter; and his stature seven feet and three-quarters. Round the
chest he was seventy inches, and his hand a foot across, and there were
no scales strong enough to judge of his weight in the market-place. Now
this man--or I should say, his backers and his boasters, for the giant
himself was modest--sent me a brave and haughty challenge, to meet
him in the ring at Bodmin-town, on the first day of August, or else to
return my champion's belt to them by the messenger.

It is no use to deny but that I was greatly dashed and scared at first.
For my part, I was only, when measured without clothes on, sixty inches
round the breast, and round the calf scarce twenty-one, only two feet
across the shoulders, and in height not six and three-quarters. However,
my mother would never believe that this man could beat me; and Lorna
being of the same mind, I resolved to go and try him, as they would pay
all expenses and a hundred pounds, if I conquered him; so confident were
those Cornishmen.

Now this story is too well known for me to go through it again and
again. Every child in Devonshire knows, and his grandson will know, the
s