nd the shower of their arrows shut out the sun and made a rattling
roof above me. You know, I think it wrong to kill a bird, or worm, or
even a Tartar. But such is the precision and rapidity of perfect science
that, with my own arrows, I split every arrow as it came against me. I
struck every flying shaft as if it were a flying bird. Therefore, Sire,
I may say truly, that I shot nothing but arrows." The king said, "I know
how clever you engineers are with your fingers." The archer said, "Oh,"
and went out.

The second archer, who had curly hair and was pale, poetical, and rather
effeminate, had merely gone out into the garden and stared at the moon.
When the moon had become too wide, blank, and watery, even for his own
wide, blank, and watery eyes, he came in again. And when the king said
"What have you been shooting?" he answered with great volubility, "I
have shot a man; not a man from Tartary, not a man from Europe, Asia,
Africa, or America; not a man on this earth at all. I have shot the
Man in the Moon." "Shot the Man in the Moon?" repeated the king with
something like a mild surprise. "It is easy to prove it," said
the archer with hysterical haste. "Examine the moon through this
particularly powerful telescope, and you will no longer find any
traces of a man there." The king glued his big blue idiotic eye to the
telescope for about ten minutes, and then said, "You are right: as
you have often pointed out, scientific truth can only be tested by the
senses. I believe you." And the second archer went out, and being of a
more emotional temperament burst into tears.

The third archer was a savage, brooding sort of man with tangled hair
and dreamy eyes, and he came in without any preface, saying, "I have
lost all my arrows. They have turned into birds." Then as he saw that
they all stared at him, he said "Well, you know everything changes on
the earth; mud turns into marigolds, eggs turn into chickens; one can
even breed dogs into quite different shapes. Well, I shot my arrows
at the awful eagles that clash their wings round the Himalayas; great
golden eagles as big as elephants, which snap the tall trees by perching
on them. My arrows fled so far over mountain and valley that they turned
slowly into fowls in their flight. See here," and he threw down a dead
bird and laid an arrow beside it. "Can't you see they are the same
structure. The straight shaft is the backbone; the sharp point is the
beak; the feather is the r