glimmering with gems, entered the lists against him. In England, where patronizing leading-articles are indited about those semi-civilized Spaniards, whenever a toreador is injured in the exercise of his profession, nothing would seem to be really known about the sport, and yet there is a self-sufficient assumption among persons called "well-informed" that they know all about it. Speaking once with a colleague of the press at Madrid, the representative of a very great English paper, I was told almost the only instructions he had received on leaving London were not to write anything of bull-fighting, or "hackneyed rubbish of that sort." Yet no nearer approach to bull-fighting has ever been witnessed in England than a silly simulacrum at the Agricultural Hall. The first calf that was enlarged from the make-believe toril on that occasion quietly proceeded to nibble a scrap of paper on the tan. The toreadores were real toreadores, but the bulls were not of the fiery breed of Andalusia. If they had been, the agents of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would have thought twice before venturing into the same enclosure with them to bar the entertainment on the score of cruelty. Still, the enterprising public caterer who had brought over the quadrille of bull-fighters was wise in his generation. Had the legitimate article been given, there was enough foretokening of patronage on the opening night to prove it would have been a great success. I call bull-fighting a glorious pastime. In my mental vision I can mark the rising gorge of some splenetic Briton of the philanthropic school as he reads this phrase, "glorious pastime," wipes his glasses and reads it again. How am I wrong? It is savage, bloodthirsty, and debasing, he will say. Therein I join issue with him, though I may bring a censorious pile of cant crumbling and clattering about my ears. Cock-fighting was once popular in these islands, and that not so long ago. I have often played truant from school, and challenged a thrashing, to drain the high pleasures of a well-contested main. The late Admiral Rous and the late Lord Derby were admirers of the sport, and if I am not mistaken the rules governing a London pit sometimes patronized by royalty had a place in the earlier editions of Hoyle. The best apology for cock-fighting I ever heard was made by an eccentric uncle of mine, who asked his censor, "Why did God put the fighting drop into the game-cock's veins but that he might fight when he got the chance?" There is cruelty, peradventure, in attaching long steel spurs, keen as bradawls, to the cocks' legs, as there is in supplying men-at-arms with swords and rifles instead of letting them wage war against one another with teeth and feet and fists--the weapons of nature. Chanticleer of the martial breed should be put into the ring with his natural spurs.