as he was strong. He was one of the best
amateur boxers of the day, as Tom Paddock, Nat Langham, and Bob Travers
could testify of their well-earned personal experience. Moreover, he
fenced as well as he boxed, and the turn of his wrist, which never
failed to disarm a swordsman, was known in more than one of the capitals
of Europe. Ten years before he started for Khiva, there was much talk at
the Rag of the wonderful feat of the young Guardsman, who undertook
for a small wager to hop a quarter of a mile, run a quarter of a mile,
ride a quarter of a mile, row a quarter of a mile, and walk a quarter of
a mile in a quarter of an hour, and who covered the mile and a quarter
of distance in ten minutes and twenty seconds.

Fred Burnaby had, whilst barely out of his teens, realised his boyish
dream, and become the strongest man in the world. But he had also begun
to pay the penalty of success in the coin of wasted tissues and failing
health. When a man finds, after anxious and varied experiments, that a
water-ice is the only form of nourishment his stomach will retain, he is
driven to the conviction that there is something wrong, and that he had
better see the doctor. The result of the young athlete's visit to the
doctor was that he mournfully laid down the dumb-bells and the foil,
eschewed gymnastics, and took to travel.

An average man advised to travel for his health's sake would probably
have gone to Switzerland or the South of France, according to the sort
of climate held to be desirable. Burnaby went to Spain, that being at
the time the most troubled country in Europe, not without promise of an
outbreak of war. Here he added Spanish to his already respectable stock
of languages, and found the benefit of the acquisition in his next
journey, which was to South America, where he spent four months
shooting unaccustomed game and recovering from the effects of his
devotion to gymnastics. Returning to do duty with his regiment, he began
to learn Russian and Arabic, going at them steadily and vigorously, as
if they were long stretches of ploughed land to be ridden over. A second
visit to Spain provided him with the rare gratification of being shut up
in Barcelona during the siege, and sharing all the privations and
dangers of the garrison. Whilst in Seville during a subsequent journey
he received a telegram saying that his father was seriously ill. France
was at the time in the throes of civil war, with the Communists holding
Pa