This encounter, pricking as it did the bubble of an age-old tradition, yet had very little effect on the admirers of the Bombardier. Or rather it was, perhaps, that they refused to believe that the Champion of England (however little that title may mean) could be really beaten by any one across the Channel. They regarded the final knock-out as an accident. After all, Wells had all but won at the very outset, and for some inscrutable reason he had given the fight away, first by lack of energy and then from sheer carelessness. This would surely have taught him a lesson? There followed after the affair at Ghent three contests in which Wells proved eminently successful. He knocked out Packey Mahoney in thirteen rounds at the National Sporting Club, after receiving early in the fight two very hard right-handers in the body which made him visibly squirm. That was one of Wells’s chief defects--he showed when he was hurt. But it was interesting to be shown that, because it was not supposed that he could stand two such blows on the body. Yet he recovered from them gradually and did not, this time, forget his boxing. The next fight was a very unequal affair with Pat O’Keefe, Middle-weight Champion of England, and subsequently winner outright of the Lonsdale Belt. O’Keefe was a fine, fair boxer, but he was giving a couple of stone, and Wells’s head was right over him. He boxed with the utmost pluck and gave the heavy-weight a lot of trouble before finally he was quite worn out and sent down beaten in the fifteenth round. Then Wells knocked out Gunner Moir quite easily in five rounds, thus turning the tables, for Moir had knocked out the Bombardier more by good luck than by sound judgment two years before. And then at last on December 5th, 1913, six months after his defeat at Ghent, the return match with Carpentier was arranged and took place at the National Sporting Club. Of course, if you regard sport only from a competitive standpoint, this affair will seem to you a sheer disaster. It was England against France, and France decisively won. It is only human nature, I suppose, which sticks the national labels so prominently on to an event of this kind, but it seems unnecessary and rather a pity. There was really no England and no France in the matter, but two boxers called respectively Carpentier and Wells, who met in a roped ring to hit each other with padded fists for the ludicrously excessive stakes of £300 a side and a purse of £3000. And now that we are more used to the idea of Frenchmen boxing than we were in those days, the international habit of thought has largely, and fortunately, dropped into the background of our minds. It is worth mentioning that members at the National Sporting Club that night paid for their guests’ seats five, ten, and as many as fifteen guineas. One onlooker, just before the men entered the ring for the big contest of the evening, left the hall.