from Smithfield to Islington, nay, even since
the aforesaid removal, I have occasionally seen
much sport got out of a lively young bullock
between Farringdon-street and Belle Sauvage-
yard— to the imminent peril of Messrs. Sampson
Low's shop windows. Perhaps there may
be also a trifle to be said in favour of the bullring.
You will not hear it said by me, for I
have gone through my course of tauromachia,
and hold a corrida do toros to be the most
brutal, cruel, and demoralising spectacle to be
seen on this lower earth, after the King of
Dahomey's " great custom." Still there are people
who like it.

So much for Bos; but who dares to defend
cock-fighting? No one, I should hope. It is
undeniably cruel, and as undeniably demoralising,
for it leads, in England at least, to
gambling and to the undue consumption of
alcoholic liquors. Again, a cock-fight not
unfrequently ends in a man-fight. That the heinous
turpitude of the thing is deeply impressed on
the English mind is obvious from the proverbial
expression employed to denote anything
unusually and superlatively profligate and
audacious— that " it beats cock-fighting." Very
properly, this barbarous sport has been put
under the special ban of the English law. It is
reached by the provisions of the act for the
prevention of cruelty to animals, commonly known
as Dick Martin's. Lawyers, cunning of fence,
have sometimes striven to show, in appeal cases,
that the cock is not a domestic animal; but the
judges all ranged in Westminster Hall— a
terrible show— have decided that chanticleer is as
much an animal as a donkey; and more than
one amateur of the cockpit royal has expiated
his fondness for the gallinaceous tournament in
county jails. There was that noble young
marquis, for instance, who indulged in the
luxury of a private cock-fight in his own
grounds on a Sunday morning. Soon did
Nemesis, in the shape of a Society's constable,
overtake that sporting peer. There was a
terrible scandal. It is true that the marquis
was not sent to the treadmill; but the case
against him was proved, and his lordship, if I
remember aright, was fined. That, at least,
was something. I dwell the more particularly
on this case, as, the moment I found cock-fighting
and Sunday morning associated in the
phrase I had penned, my ears began to tingle,
and my cheek to blush with remorseful shame.
Ah! I should be the last wretch in the world
to moralise on the wickedness of cock-fighting,
for, scarcely eleven months ago, I deliberately
attended a cock-fight. It was on a Sunday
morning, too. I may as well make a clean
breast of it, and allow the whole sad truth to
be known. I was born to be a "frightful
example" to the more virtuously disposed of
my species; and I have little doubt that all the
misfortunes I have since undergone, or which
I may be doomed to undergo, spring directly
from, or will spring from, that cock-fight. The
only thing I can plead in extenuation is, that
the fight I attended did not take place within
the London bills of mortality, or within the
sound of English church bells. The deed was
done on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea,
and on the coast of Africa.

I was at Algiers. I had just been reading in
the English papers how a whole bevy of noblemen
and gentlemen, disguised under the most
plebeian aliases, had been arrested at a sporting
public-house— Jemmy Somebody's— in London,
and marched ignominiously through the public
street to the police-court, where they were each
fined five pounds, all for cock-fighting. The
case against them was clear. The plumed
bipeds, the metal spurs, the weights and scales,
the pit itself, had all been found, and duly
produced in court by inexorable inspectors. It
was shown that a great deal of money had been
laid on the combat. " Serve them right," quoth
a stern gentleman to whom I read the report of
the case. " I'd have sent every man Jack of
them to prison for six months, with hard labour."
This downright opinion was necessarily
provocative of argument. Another gentleman
present, a mild and genial person, remarked that
he really did not see much harm in cock-fighting.
The birds, he added, evidently liked fighting;
and so long as the natural spurs only were
used—— But the stern gentleman wouldn't hear
anything in palliation of that which he termed
an abominable and degrading exhibition of
cruelty and ruffianism. It had now grown to
be about twelve at noon, and it so fell out that
Abdallah, the guide attached to the hotel, sent
to ask, with his duty, what amusement the
gentlemen would like to have provided for them
that present Sunday, adding that a capital cock-
fight was to come off at two o'clock precisely at
the Café de I'Ancienne Kiosque, on the road to
Moustafa Supérieur. We had been arguing so
long on the pros and cons of cock-fighting, without
out arriving at any satisfactory conclusion, that
Abdallah's proposition came upon us like the
refreshing spray from a hydropult on a dusty
day. The Gordian knot was severed. The
stern gentleman, and the mild gentleman, and
your humble servant, were unanimous that the
best thing to be done was to proceed to the
scene of action and compare notes on what we
saw. So we hired a carriage and went off to
the Café de I'Ancienne Kiosque. I beg to
repeat that all this took place in Africa. In
England we should not have dreamed of doing
such a thing; nor, dreaming, should we have
dared.

But it was Sunday. Long years have passed
since, in pages, brothers to those in which I now
write, I was permitted to discourse on the aspect
of Sunday in London, and on the different
Sabbaths which men, in their pride, or their strict
conscientiousness, or their sheer indifference,
had made to themselves. I have spent five
hundred Sundays in twenty different lands since
I first took pen in hand and told how I had
heard "Sunday bands" playing in the Parks,
and seen English mechanics enjoying their
"Sunday out" in suburban tea-gardens. And
am I, or are you, or is our patron Punic