a tree and watched the riot with folded arms,
mindful of his promise to Argemone, and envied Tregarva as he hurled
his assailants right and left with immense strength, and led the van
of battle royally. Little would Argemone have valued the real proof
of love which he was giving her as he looked on sulkily, while his
fingers tingled with longing to be up and doing. Strange--that mere
lust of fighting, common to man and animals, whose traces even the
lamb and the civilised child evince in their mock-fights, the
earliest and most natural form of play. Is it, after all, the one
human propensity which is utterly evil, incapable of being turned to
any righteous use? Gross and animal, no doubt it is, but not the
less really pleasant, as every Irishman and many an Englishman knows
well enough. A curious instance of this, by the bye, occurred in
Paris during the February Revolution. A fat English coachman went
out, from mere curiosity, to see the fighting. As he stood and
watched, a new passion crept over him; he grew madder and madder as
the bullets whistled past him; at last, when men began to drop by
his side, he could stand it no longer, seized a musket, and rushed
in, careless which side he took,--

'To drink delight of battle with his peers.'

He was not heard of for a day or two, and then they found him stiff
and cold, lying on his face across a barricade, with a bullet
through his heart. Sedentary persons may call him a sinful fool.
Be it so. Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto.

Lancelot, I verily believe, would have kept his promise, though he
saw that the keepers gave ground, finding Cockney skill too much for
their clumsy strength; but at last Harry Verney, who had been
fighting as venomously as a wild cat, and had been once before saved
from a broken skull by Tregarva, rolled over at his very feet with a
couple of poachers on him.

'You won't see an old man murdered, Mr. Smith?' cried he,
imploringly.

Lancelot tore the ruffians off the old man right and left. One of
them struck him; he returned the blow; and, in an instant, promises
and Argemone, philosophy and anti-game-law prejudices, were swept
out of his head, and 'he went,' as the old romances say, 'hurling
into the midst of the press,' as mere a wild animal for the moment
as angry bull or boar. An instant afterwards, though, he burst out
laughing, in spite of himself, as 'The Battersea Bantam,' who