Listening to their varied performance one night as we lay in bed, my
sporting brother proposed that on the following morning we should drag
one of the cattle-troughs to the lake to launch it and go on a voyage
in quest of these dangerous, hateful creatures and slay them with our
javelins. It was not an impossible scheme, since the creatures were to
be seen at this season swimming or floating on the surface, and in our
boat or canoe we should also detect them as they moved about over the
green sward at the bottom.
Accordingly, next morning after breakfast we set out, without
imparting our plans to any one, and with great labour dragged the
trough to the water. It was a box-shaped thing, about twenty feet long
and two feet wide at the bottom and three at the top. We were also
provided with three javelins, one for each of us, from my brother's
extensive armoury.
He had about that time been reading ancient history, and fired with
the story of old wars when men fought hand to hand, he had dropped
guns and pistols for the moment and set himself with furious zeal to
manufacture the ancient weapons--bows and arrows, pikes, shield,
battle-axes and javelins. These last were sticks about six feet long,
nicely made of pine-wood--he had no doubt bribed the carpenter to make
them for him--and pointed with old knife-blades six or seven inches
long, ground to a fearful sharpness.
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