The experience taught me what probably no amount of good advice could
have taught me. I made up my mind that I must try to learn so that I
would not again be put in such a helpless position; and having become
quickly and bitterly conscious that I did not have the natural prowess
to hold my own, I decided that I would try to supply its place by
training. Accordingly, with my father's hearty approval, I started to
learn to box. I was a painfully slow and awkward pupil, and certainly
worked two or three years before I made any perceptible improvement
whatever. My first boxing-master was John Long, an ex-prize-fighter. I
can see his rooms now, with colored pictures of the fights between Tom
Hyer and Yankee Sullivan, and Heenan and Sayers, and other great events
in the annals of the squared circle. On one occasion, to excite interest
among his patrons, he held a series of "championship" matches for the
different weights, the prizes being, at least in my own class, pewter
mugs of a value, I should suppose, approximating fifty cents. Neither
he nor I had any idea that I could do anything, but I was entered in
the lightweight contest, in which it happened that I was pitted in
succession against a couple of reedy striplings who were even worse than
I was. Equally to their surprise and to my own, and to John Long's, I
won, and the pewter mug became one of my most prized possessions. I
kept it, and alluded to it, and I fear bragged about it, for a number
of years, and I only wish I knew where it was now. Years later I read
an account of a little man who once in a fifth-rate handicap race won
a worthless pewter medal and joyed in it ever after. Well, as soon as I
read that story I felt that that little man and I were brothers.

This was, as far as I remember, the only one of my exceedingly rare
athletic triumphs which would be worth relating. I did a good deal of
boxing and wrestling in Harvard, but never attained to the first rank in