ir stories were true; but the king
believed all of them, and this became very depressing. They created the
most preposterous romances; and could not get the credit of creating
them. Their true ambition was sent empty away. They were praised as
archers; but they desired to be praised as poets. They were trusted as
men, but they would rather have been admired as literary men.

At last, in an hour of desperation, they formed themselves into a club
or conspiracy with the object of inventing some story which even the
king could not swallow. They called it The League of the Long Bow; thus
attaching themselves by a double bond to their motherland of England,
which has been steadily celebrated since the Norman Conquest for its
heroic archery and for the extraordinary credulity of its people.

At last it seemed to the four archers that their hour had come. The king
commonly sat in a green curtained chamber, which opened by four doors,
and was surmounted by four turrets. Summoning his champions to him on an
April evening, he sent out each of them by a separate door, telling him
to return at morning with the tale of his journey. Every champion bowed
low, and, girding on great armour as for awful adventures, retired to
some part of the garden to think of a lie. They did not want to think of
a lie which would deceive the king; any lie would do that. They wanted
to think of a lie so outrageous that it would not deceive him, and that
was a serious matter.

The first archer who returned was a dark, quiet, clever fellow, very
dexterous in small matters of mechanics. He was more interested in the
science of the bow than in the sport of it. Also he would only shoot at
a mark, for he thought it cruel to kill beasts and birds, and atrocious
to kill men. When he left the king he had gone out into the wood and
tried all sorts of tiresome experiments about the bending of branches
and the impact of arrows; 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, a