No fight had ever created so much excitement; it was the first contest of an international character, so that the fever was as high in the New World as in the Old. In the hurrying crowd there were great numbers of Americans, while peers, members of Parliament and men of high degree jostled the bullet-headed, broken-nosed members of the prize ring, pickpockets, bookmakers, publicans and sinners. The Sunday papers went so far as to say—but that was absolutely untrue—that such big-wigs as Lord Palmerston and a sporting Bishop were present. So great was the interest that even the _Times_ devoted three of its sacrosanct columns to a masterly description of the battle. I believe it was the first time that such an honour was conferred upon the prize ring, and it is said that the secret of the authorship is now unknown even to the _Times_ chief. My companion that night was Henry Coke, Lord Leicester’s brother, who has himself chronicled the event in his clever book “Moss from a Rolling Stone.” The train stopped near Farnborough. It was an ideal spring dawn, as sweet and fresh as the perfume of the pinewoods could make it, and the birds were singing as if they would burst their throats. It seemed a shame and a desecration to use such a morning as we were about to do; but we were too much excited, too eager, stirred by the cruel lust of fighting, to take heed of that. The ropes and stakes were soon set up and there was an immense amount of pushing and scrambling for places near Tom Sayers’ corner, so we had to stand among the Americans near Heenan. That, however, was a good place to see from, for Heenan, having won the toss, naturally chose the corner in which he would have the sun at his back, and those opposite to us had the disadvantage, like Tom himself, of having the sun in their eyes. When Sayers first threw his cap into the ring, he was dressed in a most appalling suit of dark green tartan. His taste in dress was always grotesque, for during his last years, when he had retired from the ring, he must needs wear hessian boots with tassels, gartered with the inscription “Tom Sayers, Champion” round the knee. But when he stripped he was the picture of an athlete. He was a short, good-humoured looking man, with a tremendous development of the neck and shoulders, which gave the driving power to his blows; his dark skin, brown and tanned, looking as though he had been carved out of old oak, shone in the morning sun. There was no question about it: he was trained to perfection; the muscles in the back especially were so sharply defined that they might have been mapped round with a pencil. Heenan, on the contrary, seemed to me—and many good judges shared my opinion—to have been trained a little too fine, and perhaps rather too rapidly; the skin upon his face seemed loose, and that would account for the way in which it swelled and puffed up under the terrible punishment of Tom’s iron knuckles.