“You should take to my job,” said Harrison.  “I’m a smith by trade, and I’ve not put on half a stone in fifteen years.”

“Some take to one thing and some to another, but the most of us try to ’ave a bar-parlour of our own.  There’s Will Wood, that I beat in forty rounds in the thick of a snowstorm down Navestock way, ’e drives a ’ackney.  Young Firby, the ruffian, ’e’s a waiter now.  Dick ’Umphries sells coals—­’e was always of a genelmanly disposition.  George Ingleston is a brewer’s drayman.  We all find our own cribs.  But there’s one thing you are saved by livin’ in the country, and that is ‘avin’ the young Corinthians and bloods about town smackin’ you eternally in the face.”

This was the last inconvenience which I should have expected a famous prize-fighter to be subjected to, but several bull-faced fellows at the other side of the table nodded their concurrence.

“You’re right, Bill,” said one of them.  “There’s no one has had more trouble with them than I have.  In they come of an evenin’ into my bar, with the wine in their heads.  ’Are you Tom Owen the bruiser?’ says one o’ them.  ‘At your service, sir,’ says I.  ’Take that, then,’ says he, and it’s a clip on the nose, or a backhanded slap across the chops as likely as not.  Then they can brag all their lives that they had hit Tom Owen.”

“D’you draw their cork in return?” asked Harrison.

“I argey it out with them.  I say to them, ‘Now, gents, fightin’ is my profession, and I don’t fight for love any more than a doctor doctors for love, or a butcher gives away a loin chop.  Put up a small purse, master, and I’ll do you over and proud.  But don’t expect that you’re goin’ to come here and get glutted by a middle-weight champion for nothing.”

“That’s my way too, Tom,” said my burly neighbour.  “If they put down a guinea on the counter—­which they do if they ’ave been drinkin’ very ’eavy—­I give them what I think is about a guinea’s worth and take the money.”

“But if they don’t?”

“Why, then, it’s a common assault, d’ye see, against the body of ’is Majesty’s liege, William Warr, and I ’as ’em before the beak next mornin’, and it’s a week or twenty shillin’s.”

Meanwhile the supper was in full swing—­one of those solid and uncompromising meals which prevailed in the days of your grandfathers, and which may explain to some of you why you never set eyes upon that relative.

Great rounds of beef, saddles of mutton, smoking tongues, veal and ham pies, turkeys and chickens, and geese, with every variety of vegetables, and a succession of fiery cherries and heavy ales were the main staple of the feast.  It was the same meal and the same cooking as their Norse or German ancestors might have sat down to fourteen centuries before, and, indeed, as I looked through the steam of the dishes at the lines of fierce and rugged faces, and the mighty shoulders which rounded themselves over the board, I could have