Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/70

Rh a favorite exercise in England. It is a rude sword-exercise, all cuts and parries, as if the sword had no point.

One of the mysteries of sword-knowledge is the length of time which some nations took to learn that the effective part of the weapon was

the point and not the edge. The point of a sword, during an engagement, is never more than two feet from an opponent's body, while the edge for a cutting-blow is from four to seven feet (in sweeping cuts, for instance).