I HAPPILY had not got one, whereat he fired a whole volley of abuse at me, of which I feigned as much ignorance as if it were Hebrew. As he got no change out of a foreigner on whom apparently his oratory was quite thrown away, he eventually took himself off, muttering curses upon British ignorance of foreign languages, and I felt that the tip of my nose was saved.*
An English friend of mine some little time later had a similar experience, but tackled it in a far more heroic manner. He accepted the challenge, but claimed the right of naming weapons, and chose those of Sayers and the Benicia Boy.* Whereat the German denied that fists were weapons at all and called him a coward. Then the British blood got up,* and named pistols over a table:* gave the time and place, and turned up, all ready for his latter end, to find an empty room and no opponent.
Stanford had seen for himself the wounds suffered in Mensur duels. He was especially unnerved by the ‘grand coup’, “a semi-circular cut which extends from the corner of the mouth to the top of the scalp. By way of mitigating the shock of this unanaesthetized operation the patient immediately consumes an unusual quantity of Lager beer.”
A reference to a bare-knuckle prize fight between Irish-American John Heenan (1834-1873), the ‘Benicia Boy’, and English champion Tom Sayers (1826-1865). It was the boxing event of a whole generation, as well as bare-knuckle fighting’s swansong, and was hotly debated for years afterwards. See The Sayers-Heenan Fight.
A ‘blood’ is a now dated term for young man of fashion and spirit, popular with his fellows.
Duelling across a table typically involved using short-barrelled pistols. In a famous encounter, Peter DeLancey, Deputy Royal Postmaster for the Southern Colonies, accused Dr John Haley of lying during a heated debate in the South Carolina Coffee-House in Charleston, on August 16th, 1771; naturally, Delancey was pro-British, whereas Haley was a Whig and an advocate of independence. The two men went upstairs and ‘over a table’ Haley shot DeLancey dead. The fight had no witnesses and Haley had some difficulty proving that it was not murder.