It is a situation in which raw superiority of force sometimes finds itself, and is seldom spared by disciplined superiority of skill. Kenelm, his right fist raised, paused for a moment, then, loosening the left arm, releasing the prisoner, and giving him a friendly slap on the shoulder, he turned round to the spectators and said apologetically, “He has a handsome face: it would be a shame to spoil it.” Tom’s position of peril was so obvious to all, and that good-humoured abnegation of the advantage which the position gave to the adversary seemed so generous, that the labourers actually hurrahed. Tom, himself felt as if treated like a child; and alas, and alas for him! in wheeling round, and regathering himself up, his eye rested on Jessie’s face. Her lips were apart with breathless terror: he fancied they were apart with a smile of contempt. And now he became formidable. He fought as fights the bull in the presence of the heifer, who, as he knows too well, will go with the conqueror. If Tom had never yet fought with a man taught by a prizefighter, so never yet had Kenelm encountered a strength which, but for the lack of that teaching, would have conquered his own. He could act no longer on the defensive; he could no longer play, like a dexterous fencer, with the sledge-hammers of those mighty arms. They broke through his guard; they sounded on his chest as on an anvil. He felt that did they alight on his head he was a lost man. He felt also that the blows spent on the chest of his adversary were idle as the stroke of a cane on the hide of a rhinoceros. But now his nostrils dilated; his eyes flashed fire: Kenelm Chillingly had ceased to be a philosopher. Crash came his blow--how unlike the swinging roundabout hits of Tom Bowles!--straight to its aim as the rifle-ball of a Tyrolese or a British marksman at Aldershot,--all the strength of nerve, sinew, purpose, and mind concentred in its vigour,--crash just at that part of the front where the eyes meet, and followed up with the rapidity of lightning, flash upon flash, by a more restrained but more disabling blow with the left hand just where the left ear meets throat and jaw-bone. At the first blow Tom Bowles had reeled and staggered, at the second he threw up his hands, made a jump in the air as if shot through the heart, and then heavily fell forwards, an inert mass. The spectators pressed round him in terror. They thought he was dead. Kenelm knelt, passed quickly his hand over Tom’s lips, pulse, and heart, and then rising, said, humbly and with an air of apology,-- “If he had been a less magnificent creature, I assure you on my honour that I should never have ventured that second blow. The first would have done for any man less splendidly endowed by nature. Lift him gently; take him home. Tell his mother, with my kind regards, that I’ll call and see her and him to-morrow. And, stop, does he ever drink too much beer?” “Well,” said one of the villagers, “Tom _can_ drink.”