He tightened the braces about his waist and stepped forward for the second round with a sweet and serious smile.

Yet his mouth meant business.
Master Randall--who stood near three inches taller--though nicknamed "Butcher," was merely a dull heavy-shouldered Briton, dogged, hard to beat; the son of a South Sea merchant, retired and living at Barnet, who swore by Walpole and King George.

But at Westminster these convictions--and, confound it! they were the convictions of England, after all--met with scurrilous derision; and here Master Randall nursed a dull and inarticulate resentment in a world out of joint, where the winning side was a butt for epigrams.

To win, and be laughed at! To have the account reopened in lampoons and witticisms, contemptible but irritating, when it should be closed by the mere act of winning! It puzzled him, and he brooded over it, turning sulky in the end, not vicious.

It was in no viciousness that he had flung a book at young Murray's head and called him a lousy Jacobite, but simply to provoke Wesley and get his grievance settled by intelligible weapons, such as fists.
He knew his to be the unpopular side, and that even Freind, the Head Master, would chuckle over the defeat of a Whig.