The supper was laid in a large room, with Union Jacks and mottoes hung thickly upon the walls. The tables were arranged in three sides of a square, my uncle occupying the centre of the principal one, with the Prince upon his right and Lord Sele upon his left. By his wise precaution the seats had been allotted beforehand, so that the gentlemen might be scattered among the professionals and no risk run of two enemies finding themselves together, or a man who had been recently beaten falling into the company of his conqueror. For my own part, I had Champion Harrison upon one side of me and a stout, florid-faced man upon the other, who whispered to me that he was “Bill Warr, landlord of the One Tun public-house, of Jermyn Street, and one of the gamest men upon the list.” “It’s my flesh that’s beat me, sir,” said he. “It creeps over me amazin’ fast. I should fight at thirteen-eight, and ’ere I am nearly seventeen. It’s the business that does it, what with loflin’ about behind the bar all day, and bein’ afraid to refuse a wet for fear of offendin’ a customer. It’s been the ruin of many a good fightin’-man before me.” “You should take to my job,” said Harrison. “I’m a smith by trade, and I’ve not put on half a stone in fifteen years.” “Some take to one thing and some to another, but the most of us try to ’ave a bar-parlour of our own. There’s Will Wood, that I beat in forty rounds in the thick of a snowstorm down Navestock way, ’e drives a ’ackney. Young Firby, the ruffian, ’e’s a waiter now. Dick ’Umphries sells coals—’e was always of a genelmanly disposition. George Ingleston is a brewer’s drayman. We all find our own cribs. But there’s one thing you are saved by livin’ in the country, and that is ’avin’ the young Corinthians and bloods about town smackin’ you eternally in the face.” This was the last inconvenience which I should have expected a famous prize-fighter to be subjected to, but several bull-faced fellows at the other side of the table nodded their concurrence. “You’re right, Bill,” said one of them. “There’s no one has had more trouble with them than I have. In they come of an evenin’ into my bar, with the wine in their heads. ‘Are you Tom Owen the bruiser?’ says one o’ them. ‘At your service, sir,’ says I. ‘Take that, then,’ says he, and it’s a clip on the nose, or a backhanded slap across the chops as likely as not. Then they can brag all their lives that they had hit Tom Owen.” “D’you draw their cork in return?” asked Harrison. “I argey it out with them. I say to them, ‘Now, gents, fightin’ is my profession, and I don’t fight for love any more than a doctor doctors for love, or a butcher gives away a loin chop. Put up a small purse, master, and I’ll do you over and proud. But don’t expect that you’re goin’ to come here and get glutted by a middle-weight champion for nothing.”