, with
the sledge-hammers of those mighty arms. They broke through his guard;
they sounded on his chest as on an anvil. He felt that did they alight
on his head he was a lost man. He felt also that the blows spent on the
chest of his adversary were idle as the stroke of a cane on the hide
of a rhinoceros. But now his nostrils dilated; his eyes flashed fire:
Kenelm Chillingly had ceased to be a philosopher. Crash came his
blow--how unlike the swinging roundabout hits of Tom Bowles!--straight
to its aim as the rifle-ball of a Tyrolese or a British marksman
at Aldershot,--all the strength of nerve, sinew, purpose, and mind
concentred in its vigour,--crash just at that part of the front where
the eyes meet, and followed up with the rapidity of lightning, flash
upon flash, by a more restrained but more disabling blow with the left
hand just where the left ear meets throat and jaw-bone.

At the first blow Tom Bowles had reeled and staggered, at the second he
threw up his hands, made a jump in the air as if shot through the heart,
and then heavily fell forwards, an inert mass.

The spectators pressed round him in terror. They thought he was dead.
Kenelm knelt, passed quickly his hand over Tom's lips, pulse, and heart,
and then rising, said, humbly and with an air of apology,--

"If he had been a less magnificent creature, I assure you on my honour
that I should never have ventured that second blow. The first would have
done for any man less splendidly endowed by nature. Lift him gently;
take him home. Tell his mother, with my kind regards, that I'll call and
see her and him to-morrow. And, stop, does he ever drink too much beer?"

"Well," said one of the villagers, "Tom _can_ drink."

"I thought so. Too much flesh for that muscle. Go for the nearest
doctor. You, my lad? good; off with you; quick. No danger, but perhaps
it may be a case for the lancet."

Tom Bowles was lifted tenderly by four of the stoutest men present and
borne into his home, evincing no sign of consciousness; but his face,
where not clouted with blood, was very pale, very calm, with a slight
froth at the lips.

Kenelm pulled down his shirt-sleeves, put on his coat, and turned to
Jessie,--

"Now, my young friend, show me Will's cottage."

The girl came to him, white and trembling. She did not dare to speak.
The stranger had become a new man in her eyes. Perhaps he frightened her
as much as Tom Bowles had done. But she quickened her pace, leaving the