And now Mr. Fogo, supported by Mr. Shillabeer, sat at worship, answered the responses and even essayed to join in the hymns. The behaviour of both old men was marked by highest propriety; and both put a penny in the plate when it reached them. The Bowdens, including David, were also present, and Mr. Fogo’s sole acts of inattention were caused by the circumstance that Rhoda sat beside her father. He stole several glances at her and observed a powerful, handsome young woman, exceedingly self-possessed and apparently well able to keep her nerve under any circumstances. He admitted to the ’Dumpling’ that in an ordinary emergency or difficulty Miss Bowden might probably hold her own; but a prize-fight was not an ordinary emergency, and he held that, under no conceivable tangle of circumstances, should a woman, in any capacity whatsoever, be present at such a proceeding. Mr. Merle preached, or it would be more correct to say thundered, from a peaceable text in the New Testament. He hit hard and spared not. From the lord of the manor to the landlord of ’The Corner House’ he ranged; and he called heaven to witness that, for his part, no stone should be left unturned to overthrow the forces of disorder. Incidentally Mr. Merle gave his hearers a picture of a prize-fight, for it appeared that in his degenerate Oxford days the pastor had witnessed a battle. "One of the unhappy creatures who marred God’s own image on that occasion was called Peter Crawley and known to his friends by the vulgar soubriquet of ’Young Rump Steak,’" said the clergyman. Then glaring at his congregation as though to dare a smile, he pulled his black gown from his wrists and proceeded: "The name of the other pugilist was Jem Ward, and they met on a winter’s day within a hundred miles of London--" "At Royston--I was there," whispered Mr. Fogo to Reuben Shillabeer. Both old men paid the preacher every attention. "Their degrading operations were considered to constitute a pretty day’s sport," continued Mr. Merle. "These men battered and tore and dashed each other upon the earth time after time. Again and again they fought themselves to a standstill, which is, I believe, the technical expression for absolute physical exhaustion. It was a battle of ferocious fiends disguised as men, and when this Peter Crawley had stricken the wretched Ward senseless in the eleventh round; and when both were reduced to mere swollen, half-blind palpitating masses of bruised and bleeding flesh, the people present shouted with infamous joy and bore both combatants away in triumph from the ensanguined field." "Jem lost all along of not having Tom Oliver for second," whispered Fogo.