This time Bendy kept his word, and thenceforward confined his eccentricities to occasional outbursts at Nottingham elections and other occasions of public holidays and festivities. In some of these escapades he afforded considerable amusement to the public, and employment to the pens of provincial reporters, by the mother wit of his defence, or the ludicrous aspect he imparted to the results of his fistic or gymnastic evolutions. After some solemn promises of amendment made to their worships, and a pledge to Father Mathew (he was never a sot), we heard of Bendy’s “conversion,” and of his appearance in the white choker (he always wore the straight hair) of a dissenting preacher. On the occasion of a visit to London, in which he was introduced to a congregation of the faithful at the Holborn Circus (turned for the nonce into a conventicle), a good story is told of “a keen encounter of the wits” between the ex-pugilist and a noble lord who met the preacher in a West-end thoroughfare. After a mutual stare of surprised recognition, his lordship inquired, glancing at Bendy’s parsonic “get-up,” what might be his “little game” now. As befitted his new vocation, the solemn reply was, “Truly, my lord, I am now fighting Satan――and behold the victory shall be mine.” “I hope so, Bendy,” rejoined his lordship, “but pray fight Beelzebub more fairly than you did Ben Caunt, or I may change my side.” A final word on the much-disputed nickname of Bendigo. Of course, as people generally invent some plausible meaning or derivation for a word they do not comprehend, we were told (first, I believe, by an Australian paper) that “Bendigo was the name given to an English prizefighter from his _bending as he went in to fight_. Hence called Bend-I-go.” Prodigious etymologist! We never saw any such _bend_ in Bend-i-go, or any other pugilist, though we have heard of “a Grecian bend” in a lady. William Thompson was, as we have already noted, one of three boys at a birth, and these, among people irreverently familiar with the use of Scripture names, were called (though not at the baptismal font), Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. A curious confirmation of this is now before us in our hero’s first challenge, in _Bell’s Life_, in 1835, wherein he styles himself “Abednego, of Nottingham.” Yet ever afterwards that journal prints the popular vernacular corruption of “Bendigo.” In this matter of Abednego do we not find―― The breath of chance, the bubbles of the present, Fraught with no meaning to the duller sense, Foreshow and shape our dark and unknown future? The Abednego of Nottingham, who nearly half a century ago was “ready to meet any 12st. man,” is now, in 1880, “articled” to floor the “Prince of Darkness” himself, who――we have Shakespeare’s word for it――is every inch “a gentleman.”