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the brilliant place. Stanford White came along presently and invited me
to go to the World-Champion's dressing room, which I was very glad to
do. Corbett has a fine face and is modest and diffident, besides being
the most perfectly and beautifully constructed human animal in the
world. I said:
"You have whipped Mitchell, and maybe you will whip Jackson in June--but
you are not done, then. You will have to tackle me."
He answered, so gravely that one might easily have thought him in
earnest:
"No--I am not going to meet you in the ring. It is not fair or right to
require it. You might chance to knock me out, by no merit of your own,
but by a purely accidental blow; and then my reputation would be gone
and you would have a double one. You have got fame enough and you ought
not to want to take mine away from me."
Corbett was for a long time a clerk in the Nevada Bank in San Francisco.
There were lots of little boxing matches, to entertain the crowd: then
at last Corbett appeared in the ring and the 8,000 people present went
mad with enthusiasm. My two artists went mad about his form. They said
they had never seen anything that came reasonably near equaling its
perfection except Greek statues, and they didn't surpass it.
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