Then the eleventh round began, and Fitzsimmons showed the stuff that he was made of. He always had the reputation of being strong, and hard, and phenomenally plucky: but he had been badly hurt by that blow in the ninth round and the cumulative effect of several others. Yet he did not mean to be beaten without a great struggle. Immediately time was called he dashed across the ring and attacked Jefferies with all his might. It was not of the slightest use, for Jefferies was quite ready for him and the veteran was too weak now to do any damage, but it was a good effort. Jefferies waited for him to expose his body and then sent two more hard right-handers to his heart; then several blows at the head, ending with a left half-arm blow which dazed Fitzsimmons, so that he stood, or rather tottered, helpless, with his arms down, in the middle of the ring. Jefferies looked at him for a moment to make quite sure that he was as bad as he seemed, then swung left, followed by right, to the point of the jaw. Fitzsimmons fell forward, down and out. In spite of his age and his defeat at Jefferies’s hands, Fitzsimmons challenged the champion to a second battle three years later; and on July 25th, 1902, they met again at San Francisco. It was not much of a fight, and the whole business was viewed with great disfavour in England. It was regarded as an outrageous commercial transaction: and indeed it was little more. Fitzsimmons, in fact, consented to be thrashed for so much down--consented, rather, to risk the very strong probability; for no one suggested that the fight was not a perfectly square one. Fitzsimmons was now only 11 stone 6 lb., whilst Jefferies weighed 15 stone 5 lb., quite an absurd difference when we remember also the disparity of their ages. Once more there was no sort of doubt but that the Cornishman was the better boxer. He had forgotten nothing: Jefferies had learned very little. The first two rounds were slightly in Fitzsimmons’s favour, but after that the big man’s huge natural advantages made the end inevitable. At the end of the second round Fitzsimmons was bleeding severely from the nose, and it usually takes a very heavy blow indeed to draw much blood from the nose of an old hand. But Jefferies’s cheek and eye were also cut and bleeding, for Fitzsimmons had not treated him gently. In the fourth round Jefferies crouched low and glowered at his man, bent on hurting him. He guarded the beautiful long straight lefts that Fitzsimmons sent whizzing in and attacked the slighter man’s body. The next round was very fast, whilst the men were fighting; but there was a good deal of clinching too, in which Fitzsimmons, however much he tried to save himself, got the worst of it, because the overwhelming weight of his adversary was thrown forward on to him. Superficially Jefferies looked much the worst of the two, for Fitzsimmons’s sharp blows had cut his face in several places and he was bleeding profusely. This was due not so much to the