hardness of the older man’s hitting as to the softness of Jefferies’s skin: for the champion could generally beat his opponents so easily that severe training seemed to him not worth the candle. Fitzsimmons was unmarked, but the damage was partly to his body and visible only in vague red blotches such as gloved fists make, and partly in store for him. And yet by boxing he had the better of the sixth round, and his hope rose. He was not a man of vivid imagination, just a healthily hopeful fellow, with plenty of self-confidence. Jefferies had beaten him once, and only a round or two before he had been winning--winning on points, at any rate. He had forgotten that fight now. He only knew that he was his adversary’s master in the art of boxing, and surely good boxing, skill, ringcraft, experience would win now? Did he think about it like that? Not at all. There was no time for thinking, only for an instinctive effort to do his best, to put in one of his very best and hardest blows on the point of the jaw--not the exact point, but an inch or so on either side of the exact point. That was where the impact of his glove must come, that part of his glove behind which lay the protruding knuckle of his second finger--the striking point of the anatomical piston. He must land that blow with terrific force, and the sharp upper end of the jaw would be levered up to the bundle of nerves at the place where the skull is thinnest, the semi-circular canals behind the ear would be temporarily deranged, the sense of equilibrium would go, there would be, speaking roughly and somewhat incorrectly, a slight and quickly passing concussion of the brain. The victim would fall, the old champion would be a champion once again.... Desperately Fitzsimmons tried to land that blow. But the sixth round ended and nothing happened. In the next round Jefferies came crouching, but rushing, across the ring, and Fitzsimmons caught him with a hard left on the mouth; and a little later, Jefferies, with blood to get rid of, stopped to spit (or to “expectorate,” as the sporting papers, with their inimitable refinement, put it). It was, I suppose, a legitimate opportunity, though a fastidiously chivalrous boxer would not have used it: in any case, Fitzsimmons did, and attacked his man with all his might. He sent in three hard blows, meant for the jaw, which again got Jefferies on the mouth, doing no decisive damage, and before time was called again Jefferies had got home upon the heart with one of his devastating rights, just as he had done in the previous encounter. They began the eighth round with fairly equal exchanges, and then fell into a clinch. They broke away, and as he stepped back Fitzsimmons began to talk. Now, there is no doubt that he had hurt Jefferies; certainly he had hurt him more than in the match at Coney Island. It is not to be said that he would have won if he had been more careful--who can say? The probabilities are against it. But he began