me add, a really upright and honest journal) which
is known wherever the English tongue is spoken;
a journal whose boast is that it never sleeps;
and which, having long survived the generation
of bucks, and bloods, and Corinthians to whose
tastes it ministered originally, is still the guide,
philosopher, and friend of the great sporting
world.  Few things have surprised me more
than the contrast between the newspaper-office
of my imagination and the newspaper-office of
sober fact.  Every expectation I had formed
was falsified by results.  The printers were not
slangy; the sober decorum of the boys,
messengers, and clerks was such that they might
have been in the service of an evangelical
magazine; while the gentlemen composing
the editorial department were the gentlemen
of society, the gentlemen you meet in
clubs and drawing-rooms, and, so far as I
saw, without a fox's head or a horse's
hoof amongst them in the way of ornament.
Had the compositors smacked of the race-
course, the literary staff been unmistakably fast,
the publishers loud, and the boys and messengers
redolent of stable-talk, I should have accepted
all as the appropriate condition and surroundings
of a great sporting organ.  Instead of this,
I was politely welcomed in an establishment
which is not merely sedately respectable in tone,
but is one where the kindliness and good feeling
existing among its members are so obvious
and marked as to convey the impression of a
family party in some Utopia where relations
never quarrel.  The constant chronicling of
prize-fights, the weekly analysis of studs, the
commenting week after week upon the
"performances" of horses, the "points" of dogs, and
the scores at cricket and billiards, have had no
effect on the demeanour of those deputed to
discharge these high trusts.  Having seen the
offices of newspapers celebrated for the
strictness of their principles and the purity of their
tone, I declare that of The Sleepless Life to
excel them all in its air of placid respectability
and genteel quietude.

This is the room where the editor holds a
levee every Friday afternoon throughout the
year.  Portraits of the late Mr. Sayers and
other famous professors adorn one side of it,
while the great fight at Farnborough, the
celebrated trotting mare Vixen—apparently pursued
by a large velocipede—and other interesting
pictures, cover the remaining walls.  I soon
hear a fund of instructive anecdotes concerning
the professors.  The three gentlemen present
have all been at different times maltreated or
threatened at their hands. The office of referee
at great prize-fights has been filled by each of
them, and that refined-looking man writing at
the table in the comer, was beaten until he was
insensible a few weeks ago.  A fight was in
progress, and he had been appealed to as umpire
whether a certain blow came within the conditions
laid down by the rules of the ring.  The
backers of the two men, not unnaturally, took
different views, one party maintaining it was "a
foul," and claiming the victory for the man
struck, the other insisting it was legitimate,
and that the combat must proceed.  Some
shouting and strong language, amid which the
second of the man said to have been improperly
hit appealed to the referee, "Vosn't that a foul,
now, sir?"  and almost in the same breath,
"Oh!  it weren't, weren't it?—then take that,
yer (noun substantive), and that, and that!"
accompanying each "that" with a savage blow
under the ear, in the region of the heart, and
upon the head.  The referee fell insensible, and
his physical monitor, Mr. Ross Filer, having
thus satisfied his Spartan sense of justice, went
back to his corner with the air of a man who
had done his duty in spite of opposition.  Legal
redress for the outrage was of course impossible,
the business of the gathering and the gathering
itself being alike forbidden by law;  but
retribution has, for all that, fallen upon Mr. Filer.
That energetic zealot unites the business of a
publican with the pastime of prize-fighting, and
he has, since his brutal conduct, been declared
dead to the world of sporting readers.  His name
is properly tabooed by the sporting press, his
sparring displays and benefits are never
chronicled, and the professors themselves speak of
him as a blackguard whom there is no redeeming.
So much for Mr. Filer, who had, at a previous
fight, encouraged another of the gentlemen
before me, in the impartial discharge of his
judicial functions, by the cheering speech, "If he
doesn't do wot's right (i.e. what it suits the
pocket of me, Ross Filer, to call right), we'll
murder him!"  A previous editor of the Sleepless,
while acting as judge at a prize-ring, received
a blow from a bludgeon, from which he
never really rallied, and which caused his death.
His immediate successor has been hitherto more
fortunate, never having been actually struck,
though frequently threatened.  He pointed out
a particular corner of the room we were in,
between the window and the fire, where, by placing
your back firmly against the wall and seizing
the poker, you may, always supposing you are a
good hand at single-stick, protect yourself
effectually against violence.  This was no imaginary
hypothesis.  The speaker has had to adopt these
precautions more than once when conversing
with the professors, and when the arguments of
the latter have assumed the shape of clenched
fists and foul threats.

While I mastered these suggestive details,
and learned that several well-known pugilists
were expected to drop in that afternoon, the
crowd outside had gradually increased.  The
small groups outside the two public-houses
opposite had received numerous additions, and
had now merged together so as to form a thick
fringe of frouzy humanity, which covered the
pavement to right and left, balanced itself
uneasily on the kerbstone, and at last overflowed
on to the roadway.  Not a prepossessing
crowd by any means.  Irish labourers of
distinctly bibulous tendencies, who looked
listlessly to right and left as if for a new excitement,
and expectorated thoughtfully when a
prize-fighter passed them;  hangers-on of the