At about five minutes to eight even the chairs on the stage were filled, and, at eight sharp, an important person with a cigar stepped into the ring, and made a short speech introducing the first pair of boxers. He retired amid loud applause, but the boxers, to my surprise, turned out to be a couple of half-grown, ill-nourished, ill-washed lads, no older than myself. They were naked except for short linen drawers, and it seemed to me that it would have been no harm had they been put into a bath prior to their appearance. They grinned sheepishly at the audience, amongst whom they evidently recognised “pals”; and these “pals,” in turn, greeted them with cries of “Go it, Bob,” “Go on, the wee lad,” “Go on, the stripes”――this last in allusion to Bob’s unambitious costume, which had all the appearance of being simply a pair of bathing-drawers. They shook hands in a nerveless way, without looking at each other, and began to spar feebly. Bob was so thin you could count his ribs, and the big gloves at the ends of his long skinny arms looked like gigantic puff-balls. The “wee lad” was sturdier, but he seemed to me to be slightly deformed. Even to my inexperienced eye it was perfectly obvious that the main concern of both was not to get hurt, and they hadn’t finished the first round before the audience was shouting, “Take them off them! Take them off them!” This was in allusion to the gloves, but they also shouted other things, most of which I daresay I had heard before, though never so many at one time, and I reflected that George had managed to steer fairly clear of the “Sankey and Moody touch.”