Читать книгу Pugilistica онлайн

158 страница из 296

4.—Vipond came to the scratch with far different spirits to those he started with: he was nervous in the extreme, and a person might easily guess that if he had known as much before as he did then he would have left Mr. Irishman for somebody else. Vipond’s ivory box was visited by Pat’s left mawley; by a ditto from the right, on the old sore on the temple, he went down, and the amateurs thought he would not come again. Langan during this round, and, in fact, all the others, was laughing.

5.—It was astonishing how willingly Vipond came to the scratch; but though he made some excellent hits, none of them told, they were so well stopped. Unfortunately for Matthew there was a kind of magnetic attraction between Paddy’s left hand and the Lancashire man’s frontispiece, which kept the claret continually streaming, and before the round was half over, Matthew seemed as if sprinkled by a mop. This was the busiest and the longest round in the fight; it ended by their getting entangled at the ropes, and both were down in a struggle for the throw.