no grace (I am speaking of my own impressions.) The strongest man
wins; the man who, with his heavily-padded arm, always in an unnatural
position, can hold his huge clumsy sword longest without growing too weak
to be able either to guard or to strike.

The whole interest is centred in watching the wounds. They come always
in one of two places--on the top of the head or the left side of the
face. Sometimes a portion of hairy scalp or section of cheek flies up
into the air, to be carefully preserved in an envelope by its proud
possessor, or, strictly speaking, its proud former possessor, and shown
round on convivial evenings; and from every wound, of course, flows a
plentiful stream of blood. It splashes doctors, seconds, and spectators;
it sprinkles ceiling and walls; it saturates the fighters, and makes
pools for itself in the sawdust. At the end of each round the doctors
rush up, and with hands already dripping with blood press together the
gaping wounds, dabbing them with little balls of wet cotton wool, which
an attendant carries ready on a plate. Naturally, the moment the men
stand up again and commence work, the blood gushes out again, half
blinding them, and rendering the ground beneath them slippery. Now and
then you see a man's teeth laid bare almost to the ear, so that for the
rest of the duel he appears to be grinning at one half of the spectators,
his other side, remaining serious; and sometimes a man's nose gets slit,
which gives to him as he fights a singularly supercilious air.

As the object of each student is to go away from the University bearing
as many scars as possible, I doubt if any particular pains are taken to
guard, even to the small extent such method of fighting can allow. The
real victor is he who comes out with the greatest number of wounds; he
who then, stitched and patched almost to unrecognition as a human being,
can promenade for the next month, the envy of the German youth, the
admiration of the German maiden. He who obtains only a few unimportant
wounds retires sulky and disappointed.

But the actual fighting is only the beginning of the fun. The second act
of the spectacle takes place in the dressing-room. The doctors are
generally mere medical students--young fellows who, having taken their
degree, are anxious for practice. Truth compels me to say that those
with whom I came in contact were coarse-looking men who seemed rather to
relish their work. Perhaps they are not