4.—A short round. Burke’s nob again visited; a rally in favour of the Deaf’un and both down.
5, 6, and 7.—Very similar. Crawley showing increasing signs of punishment; the Deaf’un’s left ear tremendously swelled, and some blue marks about his frontispiece. In a rally Crawley missed his right and struck it flush against the stake. Burke was undermost in the last-named round.
8.—Crawley, a deplorable spectacle, rushed in and got jobbed severely; in the close Burke threw Crawley heavily. Tim had no pretence to wrestling skill, and his right hand seemed almost hors de combat from contact with Burke’s granite skull and the oaken stake.
9.—Crawley nearly dark in one window, and the other with the shutter half-up. The Deaf’un now went in in turn. He allowed Crawley to get on his favourite right at the ribs, jumping aside at the moment with a quick step, and sending his own right as a return smash into poor Tim’s frontispiece. Ding-dong till both out of breath and Crawley down.
10–25.—The whole of these rounds were too much alike to deserve particular description. They varied only in which of the men finished the round by being first down at the close, and in this Crawley scored a large majority. In the 25th round Crawley’s remaining daylight became so nearly darkened that his last chance seemed gone. General Barton asked him to leave off, but he refused, saying, “Sure, yer hanner, an’ I can bate that fellow yet.” So he was indulged in seven more short rounds, and then, at the thirty-third, being in total darkness, his backers withdrew him after a slogging battle of 30 minutes only!
Remarks.—Each time the Deaf’un appears in the ring, he surprises us by his manifest improvement. True, Crawley turned out a perfect novice, still the Deaf’un’s style of hitting, stopping, and getting away from a powerful and determined assailant was a clever demonstration of the art of defence; while the way, when the time came, in which he adminstered pepper with both hands at close quarters was something astonishing. Burke walked to his conveyance; he declared himself little hurt by Crawley’s body blows. Poor Tim was carried to his patron’s drag, and was soon conversable. He declared, no doubt with truth, that he “Couldn’t for the life of him make out how he was bate, at all, at all, no more nor a babby.” Some of the fancy suggested that the great Irish champion, Simon Byrne, with whom Jem Ward’s fiasco of Leicester was yet rankling in the public mind, might find his match in the Deaf’un; but this was not yet to be.
The sky had how cleared and the wind abated, when some fun was promised by a proposed fight between two well-known eccentric characters in the fistic world. These were no other than the facetious Tommy Roundhead, the trainer, and in after-time the “Secretary” to Deaf Burke, and the renowned Frosty-faced Fogo, D.C.G. (Deputy Commissary General), C.P.M. (Chief Purveyor of Max), and P.L.P.R. (Poet Laureate to the Prize Ring), for all these honours had been conferred on him by the Press. These illustrious wights had it seems differed (so it is rumoured) about the etymology of a Greek verb, the use of the digamma, or the literary attainments of Jack Scroggins; and in one branch of the disputation Tommy had not only asserted his own superiority in prose and poetry to the Laureate, but had offered to back Scroggins against him in writing blank verse or hexameters. Fired at the insult, the Frosty-faced’un tipped Tommy such a volley of black (letter) chaff that the latter declared himself quiet dumb-founded and nonplushed; so he offered to post five bob, and to fight Fogo in the same ring as Burke and Tim Crawley, just to settle the knotty dispute. Frosty’s official duties having ceased with the exit from the ring of the two principals, the Deputy Commissary stepped into the middle of the ring, and “thrice called aloud for Richmond” (we beg pardon, Roundhead). Before, however, he was “hoarse with calling” Roundhead, Tommy appeared, ready stripped to the waist, hopping through the mud like a pelted frog. Shouts of laughter greeted his entrée to the ropes, and at once he of the Frosty-face, hearing his defiance answered, began (unlike the Homeric heroes) to divest himself of his panoply, and would have been quickly in his natural buff suit, had not the ring filled with curious inquirers, anxious to learn the cause of this unusual commotion. The matter explained, the literati (represented by the ring-reporters), the University wranglers, and the aristocracy of the P.R., decided unanimously and with one voice (remember it was “raining cats and dogs”) that it would be derogatory for so distinguished a votary of Apollo to descend from Parnassus to roll his laurelled brow in Middlesex mud. “Forbid it, Phœbus, and ye Muses nine!” exclaimed Cicero Holt, then, descending to plain prose, he added, “Come, shove on your toggery, Frosty-face, you’ll catch cold, you old muff;” and, suiting the action to the word, he tried to thrust the “pen-hand” of the irate bard into the ragged sleeve-lining of his “upper Ben.” The task was impracticable. “There’s five bob down, and I’ll have a round for it,” cried the Fancy Orpheus. “Oh, d—— your five bob, Frosty, we’ll make that right,” cried half-a-dozen voices. At that moment poor Frosty beheld with dismay the greasy sleeve of his old coat torn clean out at the shoulder, and his own naked arm protruding from the yawning rent. He felt like
“That bard forlorn,
By Bacchanals torn
On Thracian Hebrus’ side,”