To take boxing lessons from a professional who really knew something touching the "noble art of self-defense," as the followers of ring sports would say, was something that I had never had an opportunity of doing before, and it is hardly to be wondered at that I availed myself of the chance before I had been there a very long time.
I towered over McLean like a mountain over a mole hill, and I remember well that the first time that I faced him I thought what an easy matter it would be for me to knock his reputation into a cocked hat, and that before a man could say "Jack Robinson." In a very few moments, however, I had changed my opinion.

I had fancied that I was a pretty good sort of a man myself with or without the gloves, but long before the end of that first lesson I had come to the conclusion that my education in that line, as well as others, had been neglected, and that I still had considerable to learn.

McLean went around me very much as a cooper goes around a barrel, hitting me wherever and whenever he pleased, and the worst of the matter was that I could not hit him at all.

It was not until after he had convinced me just how little I knew that he began to teach me, beginning with the rudiments of the art.

I proved to be an apt pupil and soon became quite proficient at the game, in fact so good was I that I sometimes fancied that I could lick a whole army of wildcats, this being especially the case when the beer was in and the wit was out, for be it beer or wine, the effect is generally the same, a fact that I had not yet learned, though it dawned on me long before I left Philadelphia, and I quit it for good and all, to which fact I attribute the success that I have since met with both in the sporting and the business world.
It was in 1875 and during my last season with the Athletics, if I remember rightly, that I became involved in a saloon row, that, to say the least of it, was not to my credit, and that I have been ashamed of ever since.