eous anger
of the crowd, for the laws of the game were known to everybody and were
universally respected. I hope I am not going to sermonise often in the
course of this narrative, but I have always thought that the legislative
meddling with the Prize Ring was a grave mistake. The hooliganism of
modern days was absolutely unknown at the time of which I write and the
roughest crowd might be relied upon to see fair play between any chance
pair of combatants. But the best of the sport was that it was commonly
carried on out of that pure hardihood which at one time made the rougher
sort of Englishman the pick of the world for valour and endurance. The
sentimentalists and humanitarians abolished the Prize Ring because of
its brutality, and the result is that all sense of honour has gone out
among the rougher classes, and the record of the police courts have
familiarised everybody with the use of the knife in private warfare, a
thing almost unknown until the Prize Ring was abolished.

I have very often thought it odd that I have not even a fragmentary
memory of the very earliest steps in education. I recall quite easily a
time when I could not read, and the recollection of one superb moment
is very often with me. That moment came with the reading of a story,
entitled _The Mandates Revenge; or the Riccaree War Spear_, which came
from the pen of Mr Percy B. St John, and may still be found in some
far-away number of _Chambers's Journal_. I have never gone back to that
story. I have never had the courage to go back. It would be something
like a crime to dissipate the halo of romance and splendour which lives
about it, as I know most certainly I should do if I read it over again.
I daresay Mr St John was an estimable person in his day; but he
could not have written one such story as that my memory so dimly, yet
splendidly recalls, without having made himself immortal. In sober
truth, I do not believe that any man, whatever, in any time or country,
ever wrote a story quite as enthralling and as wonderful as I thought
the _Mandans Revenge_ to be. The curious part about this recollection
to me is, not that I should have found so intense a joy in what was
probably a very commonplace piece of hackwork, but that the faculty
of reading at all was, as it were, sprung upon me, and that I remember
clearly a feeling of surprise that I had not discovered this wonderful
resource before. In effect, I said to myself, "This is the best thing
I hav