"Well, don't forget, we've got to give the crowd a run for its money," he said. "We'll fix it up between us how many rounds a fight should go. Now your next bout will be with the Flying Dutchman. Suppose you let it run the full fifteen and put him out in the last round. That will give you a chance to make a showing as well." "All right, Sam," was the answer. "It will be a test for you," Stubener warned. "You may fail to put him out in that last round." "Watch me." Pat paused to put weight to his promise, and picked up a volume of Longfellow. "If I don't I'll never read poetry again, and that's going some." "You bet it is," his manager proclaimed jubilantly, "though what you see in such stuff is beyond me." Pat sighed, but did not reply. In all his life he had found but one person who cared for poetry, and that had been the red-haired school teacher who scared him off into the woods. V "Where are you going?" Stubener demanded in surprise, looking at his watch. Pat, with his hand on the door-knob, paused and turned around. "To the Academy of Sciences," he said. "There's a professor who's going to give a lecture there on Browning to-night, and Browning is the sort of writer you need assistance with. Sometimes I think I ought to go to night school." "But great Scott, man!" exclaimed the horrified manager. "You're on with the Flying Dutchman to-night." "I know it. But I won't enter the ring a moment before half past nine or quarter to ten. The lecture will be over at nine fifteen. If you want to make sure, come around and pick me up in your machine." Stubener shrugged his shoulders helplessly. "You've got no kick coming," Pat assured him. "Dad used to tell me a man's worst time was in the hours just before a fight, and that many a fight was lost by a man's breaking down right there, with nothing to do but think and be anxious. Well, you'll never need to worry about me that way. You ought to be glad I can go off to a lecture." And later that night, in the course of watching fifteen splendid rounds, Stubener chuckled to himself more than once at the idea of what that audience of sports would think, did it know that this magnificent young prize-fighter had come to the ring directly from a Browning lecture.