never yet had Kenelm encountered a strength which, but for the lack of
that teaching, would have conquered his own. He could act no longer
on the defensive; he could no longer play, like a dexterous fencer,
with the sledge-hammers of those mighty arms. They broke through his
guard; they sounded on his chest as on an anvil. He felt that did
they alight on his head he was a lost man. He felt also that the
blows spent on the chest of his adversary were idle as the stroke of a
cane on the hide of a rhinoceros. But now his nostrils dilated; his
eyes flashed fire: Kenelm Chillingly had ceased to be a philosopher.
Crash came his blow--how unlike the swinging roundabout hits of Tom
Bowles!--straight to its aim as the rifle-ball of a Tyrolese or a
British marksman at Aldershot,--all the strength of nerve, sinew,
purpose, and mind concentred in its vigour,--crash just at that part
of the front where the eyes meet, and followed up with the rapidity of
lightning, flash upon flash, by a more restrained but more disabling
blow with the left hand just where the left ear meets throat and
jaw-bone.

At the first blow Tom Bowles had reeled and staggered, at the second
he threw up his hands, made a jump in the air as if shot through the
heart, and then heavily fell forwards, an inert mass.

The spectators pressed round him in terror. They thought he was dead.
Kenelm knelt, passed quickly his hand over Tom's lips, pulse, and
heart, and then rising, said, humbly and with an air of apology,--

"If he had been a less magnificent creature, I assure you on my honour
that I should never have ventured that second blow. The first would
have done for any man less splendidly endowed by nature. Lift him
gently; take him home. Tell his mother, with my kind regards, that