ime, when the Archduke Albert came to Namur, the citizens
had one of these stilt-battles, and it proved a very profitable one to
them. Before the fight began, the governor of the city promised the
Archduke to show him a battle between two bodies of men, who would be
neither on horseback nor on foot; and when the engagement was over,
Albert was so much pleased that he gave the town the privilege of
being forever exempt from the duties on beer.

As the good folks of Namur were nearly as good at drinking beer as
they were at walking on stilts, this was a most valuable present for
them.

Things are different in this country. It is said that in 1859 a man
walked across the rapids of the Niagara river on stilts, but I never
heard of any of his taxes being remitted on that account.

DRAWING THE LONG BOW.

[Illustration]

When a man has a bow and arrows as long as those used by some of the
natives of Brazil, so that he has to lie down on his back, and hold
the bow with his foot when he shoots, he may well be said to draw a
long bow, but it is not of these people that I now intend to speak.
Without describing any particular school of archery, I merely wish to
give a few instances where "the long bow" has been drawn in words,
about feats with the bow and arrows.

This expression, "drawing the long bow," does not always mean that a
falsehood has been told. It often refers to a very wonderful story,
which may be true enough, but which is so marvellous that it requires
a firm trust in the veracity of the narrator for us to believe it.

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 "AEneid,"
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 a