Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/490

 of his voyage to those islands in 1745, remarks that the game on stilts holds the first rank among the pleasures of the Kanakas. On their stilts, he says, which raise them three or four feet above the ground, they give themselves up to combats, and great is the laughter that greets the fall of the awkward. These contests are traditional at Namur, and constitute a kind of national tournament. The contestants form two parties. Each camp is composed of seven or eight hundred combatants, with a captain, officers, a banner, and a cockade. The stiltsmen come into the grand square, announced by martial music. Each party occupies its side of the place, waiting for the signal for opening. The bells sound at every attack, flags fly from the windows, and a crowd of spectators and friends attend to witness the sport. At the giving of the signal the camps engage in the attack. At the first meeting a large number of the contestants fall heavily to the ground and lie there without being able to rise, exposed to being



trodden upon unless some of the friends who accompany them—wife, mother, or sister—come to their assistance, and lift them up with considerable effort and often after unsuccessful attempts. The contestant, set upon his stilts again, precipitates himself anew into the fight, unless he has been hurt too badly by his first fall. It is not necessary to add that these sports are often dangerous.

The stiltsmen of Namur who gave representations before Charles V, Peter the Great, and Bonaparte, preserve piously in their archives and repeat with pride the saying of Marshal Saxe, that "if two armies should clash together with as much energy as the youth of Namur, the affair would not be a battle, but a butchery."