‘Say, you!’ said the pork-butcher, and sharply smiled, for he was a man of size.

‘I would give you two minutes,’ rejoined Skepsey, eyeing him intently and kindly:  insomuch that it could be seen he was not in the conundrum vein.

‘Rather short allowance, eh, master?’ said the bigger man.  ‘Feel here’; he straightened out his arm and doubled it, raising a proud bridge of muscle.

Skepsey performed the national homage to muscle.

‘Twice that, would not help without the science,’ he remarked, and let his arm be gripped in turn.

The pork-butcher’s throat sounded, as it were, commas and colons, punctuations in his reflections, while he tightened fingers along the iron lump.  ‘Stringy.  You’re a wiry one, no mistake.’  It was encomium.  With the ingrained contempt of size for a smallness that has not yet taught it the prostrating lesson, he said:  ‘Weight tells.’

‘In a wrestle,’ Skepsey admitted.  ’Allow me to say, you would not touch me.’

‘And how do you know I’m not a trifle handy with the maulers myself?’

‘You will pardon me for saying, it would be worse for you if you were.’

The pork-butcher was flung backward.  ’Are you a Professor, may I inquire?’

Skepsey rejected the title.  ’I can engage to teach young men, upon a proper observance of first principles.’

‘They be hanged!’ cried the ruffled pork-butcher.  ’Our best men never got it out of books.  Now, you tell me—­you’ve got a spiflicating style of talk about you—­no brag, you tell me—­course, the best man wins, if you mean that:  now, if I was one of ’em, and I fetches you a bit of a flick, how then?  Would you be ready to step out with a real Professor?’

‘I should claim a fair field,’ was the answer, made in modesty.

‘And you’d expect to whop me with they there principles of yours?’

‘I should expect to.’

‘Bang me!’ was roared.  After a stare at the mild little figure with the fitfully dead-levelled large grey eyes in front of him, the pork-butcher resumed:  ’Take you for the man you say you be, you’re just the man for my friend Jam and me.  He dearly loves to see a set-to, self the same.  What prettier?  And if you would be so obliging some day as to favour us with a display, we’d head a cap conformably, whether you’d the best of it, according to your expectations, or t’ other way:—­For there never was shame in a jolly good licking as the song says:  that is, if you take it and make it appear jolly good.  And find you an opponent meet and fit, never doubt.  Ever had the worse of an encounter, sir?’

‘Often, Sir.’

‘Well, that’s good.  And it didn’t destroy your confidence?’

‘Added to it, I hope.’

At this point, it became a crying necessity for Skepsey to escape from an area of boastfulness, into which he had fallen inadvertently; and he hastened to apologize ‘for his personal reference,’ that was intended for an illustration of our country caught unawares by a highly trained picked soldiery, inferior in numbers to the patriotic levies, but sharp at the edge and knowing how to strike.  Measure the axe, measure the tree; and which goes down first?