his comical notions were set forth. Of Jem’s physical powers and muscular endowments, the story of his Ring performances in after years will sufficiently speak. Thus the young “Jack-in-the-Water,” like Topsy, “grow’d,” and we need not say he was well furnished in these respects to take his own part in the very rough “battle of life” to which he was from his earliest infancy introduced. That the future Candidate for the Championship, born and bred in those “fighting days,” when Gully and Gregson, Belcher and Cribb, were on every tongue, should have yearnings to “improve his gifts,” as the goody-goody books express it, was but a natural sequence to what philosopher Square calls “the eternal fitness of things.” Hard by the Strand Lane stairs stood a well-frequented public-house, known as “The Spotted Dog,” the landlord of which was an ex-pugilist of no mean renown, hight “Joe Parish, the Waterman.” What wonder, that Joe’s judicious eye noted the good “points” in the sturdy little “Jack-in-the Water’s” build and disposition, and that he befriended the boatman’s orphan, patting his head as he warmed his chilled hands by the tap-room fire, where he dried his always damp and scanty clothing, and, as the Deaf’un himself has told us, saying, “You go straight, Jemmy, and we’ll see if you won’t be a topsawyer among ’em yet”? This early patronage by Joe Parish, as we shall see hereafter, continued down to Burke’s latest days, a fact creditable to both parties. A passing remark on the pugilistic eminence of watermen may here be in place. Jack Broughton, the Father of the Ring, was a waterman; as also was Lyons, who beat Darts for the Championship in 1769; while, passing over many boxers who plied the oar, the names of Bishop Sharpe, Harris, “The Waterman,” Harry Jones, and the Deaf’un’s “guide, philosopher, and friend,” Joe Parish, occur to us. No wonder, then, that on the 5th of February, 1828, young Jem Burke, under the wing of old Joe, was by the ring-side at Whetstone, near Barnet, an admiring spectator of the eccentric battle which there and then took place between a couple of dwarfs; one a Welshman named David Morgan, a vendor of shrimps and shell fish well known in various sporting and other public-houses, and the other Sandy M’Bean, a Scotch professor of the Highland bagpipes and the “fling.” After a ludicrous display of bantam game, Taffy was declared the conqueror, the second of the canny Scot carrying him out of the ring _vi et armis_, in spite of his protestations that he “wasna beaten ava’,” though the poor little fellow had not the ghost of a chance.