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army to vanquish the Persians with the same analogy:
Behold: these do not fight for their household gods, for the monuments of their ancestors, for glory, for liberty or the safety of their children; but only because the one will not give way to the other
. In Christian lands, to give one’s cocks strength, one fed them filched bread from the altar-table.
    Austin continued to watch. The docked birds dashed to each other and remained beak to beak, each shaved serpent neck straining upwards. Then came the familiar, blustering rattle as of a masterless sail in a whirlwind. Beating, gnawing and striking the cocks sprang from the mat, wrung together, and the red-haired student screeched and shot his arms over his head, half concussing a dyer and knocking a barber’s hat over his face like a chafing dish.
    Then the birds dropped, in a fury of warm, gouting blood and black feathers, and Austin saw that the birchen grey, a big eight-pound fowl, had a spur sunk up to the hilt in its enemy’s neck, and the fight was already over.
    He would have gone then to his room, but the crowd behind held himstapled fast to his place. They took the dead bird out for the pot, and the owner, his beaming face red in the torchlight, lifted the victor tenderly in his thick hands and with his tongue began searching its injuries.
    Soon, stinking with curative urine, it would take a pat of sweet rosemary butter and be put to stove in the straw of its sweating basket. It had been fortunate. He had seen a fight between two wounded cocks last a couple of hours, even though the spurs were cut smooth and sharp with a penknife. As the ancients had said: in their raging pride, indifferent to pain and injury, they would fight to the end of their powers.
    Looking through the eyes of the man opposite you could, he supposed, see a barbaric magnificence in it. You could admire the quick, graceful movements of the bird they now put on the mat, with its tight glossy plumage and muscular thighs; brilliant yellow on shoulder and saddle. Or the sprightly strut of its black and red adversary, the polled head darting and glinting; the spurs growing low and wicked and curved on the white and sinewy legs.
    They liked to fight, it was said. It was their instinct. They would seek battle regardless of the presence of man, and would pine if denied it. And here, in the darting bodies, the sparring, the dodging, the high, rustling flirts when with beak, foot and spur, bird grappled with bird, there was strength and fire and a most unflinching valour for men to admire and emulate.
    Half an hour went by of the struggle. By the end of it the golden fowl, slashed and impaled, was sorely beaten, but continued steadily to attack its superb and untouched antagonist.
    Then it weakened. In silence among the screaming spectators Austin Grey watched the tired legs beginning to tremble; the beak to open; the tongue to palpitate. One barred yellow wing trailed on the mat and when, in the flurries, it sought to grip with its beak, the rich red wings of its foe beat it down, and the other’s strong spurs struck again and again, at its head, its throat or its neck, or the place in its back where, sinking through, the sharpened point would spear through its vitals.
    Austin had laid no wagers. But when, in one such bustle, the golden cock struck to the head and against all expectation, the bigger bird disengaged and dropped aside, staggering, he was glad; as if he and not the duckwing had been suffering. Then he saw what the chance blow had done. The black-breasted red had lost the use of its eyes.
    Silence fell. The yellow bird, its abdomen slit, was almost vanquished. It moved as if drunk, toppling first on its breast and then on its ragged docked tail and you could see sweat, like citrines, on the torn feathers. It lay, red eyes glaring its challenge.
    And the red, strong still, trod forward groping in darkness and found and gripped the fallen bird with its beak. Then, beating down its cut