when even he found it tiresome he returned to the house of the four
turrets and narrated his adventure. "Well," said the king,
"what have you been shooting?" "Arrows," answered the archer.
"So I suppose," said the king smiling; "but I mean, I mean what
wild things have you shot?" "I have shot nothing but arrows,"
answered the bowman obstinately. "When I went out on to the plain
I saw in a crescent the black army of the Tartars, the terrible
archers whose bows are of bended steel, and their bolts as big
as javelins. They spied me afar off, and 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 rudimentary plumage.
It is merely modification and evolution." After a silence the king
nodded gravely and said, "Yes; of course everything is evolution."
At this the third archer suddenly and violently left the room,
and was heard in some distant part of the building making extraordinary
noises either of sorrow or of mirth.
The fourth archer was a stunted man with a face as dead as wood,
but with wicked little eyes close together, and very much alive.
His comrades dissuaded him from going in because they said that they
had soared up into the seventh heaven of living lies, and that there
was literally nothing which the old man would not believe. The face
of the little archer became a little more wooden as he forced his way in,
and when he was inside he looked round with blinking bewilderment.
"Ha, the last," said the king heartily, "welcome back again!"