Page:Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy, Stockton, 1872.djvu/234

224 So now let us see what long bows have been drawn about bows and arrows.

Such stories commenced long ago. The poet Virgil, in the "Æneid," tells of four archers who were shooting for a prize, the mark being a pigeon, tied by a cord to the mast of a ship. The first man struck the mast with his arrow, the second cut the cord, and the third shot the pigeon while it was flying away. There now being nothing for the fourth archer to shoot at, he just drew his bow, and sent his arrow flying towards the sky with such velocity that the friction of the air set the feathers on fire, and it swept on, like a fiery meteor, until it disappeared in the clouds.

It would be very hard, even in this progressive age, to beat that story.

The Greeks could tell tall stories, too, of their archers. An historian, named Zosimus, tells of a man who shot, at the same time, three arrows from the same bow at three different targets, and hit them all! It is to be hoped that his histories contained some things easier to believe than this.

But as we approach the present age we still find wonderful narrations about archers. Robin Hood, for instance, was a great fellow with the bow. It is said that on one occasion he shot an arrow so that it fell a mile from where he was standing! A long shot, and hard to be equalled by the crack rifles of the present day.

Sir Walter Scott, in "Ivanhoe," introduces Robin Hood under the name of Locksley, and in a shooting match, when his opponent had planted his arrow right in the centre of the bull's-eye, and everybody, of course, thought that nothing better than that could be done, Master Robin just steps up and lets fly his arrow, driving it into the arrow that was sticking in the target, splitting it from end to end!

And then there is that famous story about William Tell. Many