“Hope so, Bendy,” said his lordship, “but if you don’t fight Beelzebub more fairly than you did Ben Caunt, I’ll change sides.” Like other converts Bendigo occasionally fell from grace: but the family bias towards evangelical assiduity swung him periodically towards uprightness till his death in 1880. CHAPTER XVIII NAT LANGHAM AND TOM SAYERS Tom Sayers was the last of the great champions of England under the old dispensation. And, as champions go, he was a little man, standing 5 feet 8 inches and usually weighing about 11 stone. He was born at Brighton in 1826, and as a lad was apprenticed to a bricklayer there. At the age of twenty-two he came to London to work on the London and North-Western Railway. He was known from a lad as being fairly handy with the gloves, and in more than one pot-house brawl he had shown more than that he could take care of himself. In all his fights, with one exception, he gave away weight. His first battle was in 1849, with Abe Crouch, who was two stone the heavier and whom Sayers decisively thrashed. He fought for two and a half hours with Jack Grant of Southwark, and just beat him after an extraordinary display of pluck. Sayers’s only defeat was at the hands of Nat Langham, in October of 1853. And this beating was certainly due to over-confidence, not during, but before the fight. The men were nearly equal in weight and Langham was six years older. As he had been used to giving other opponents as many stone as he was giving Langham pounds, he took very little trouble with his training, and entered the ring somewhat soft. Langham, on the other hand, had got into excellent condition in the hands of Ben Caunt. _Bell’s Life_ tells us quite frankly in its issue just before this battle that the “Blues” were to be outwitted, that the rendezvous for the combat was being kept a strict secret, but that information as to the place and time could be obtained at Ben Caunt’s or Alec Keene’s. In the event a train left Bishopsgate Street Station for an unknown destination, when, while the day was still young, a ring was formed and the men set to.