Keep the left shoulder back.
[The Third Evening]
I.
“We will continue the course of instruction of which you have studied at present only the first page; I am going into very minute detail, as you see.
“Our scholar now knows the different positions, and can appreciate why they are to be commended, and what is to be gained by adopting them. At the next lesson,—and each lesson would consist of not more than three bouts of eight or ten minutes each,—I should show him and make him execute the simple attacks and the simple parries:—Disengagements in tierce and quarte, straight thrusts, the cut over, and parries of quarte and tierce. The attacks will exercise him in the lunge, the parries will improve the flexibility of his wrist.
“I should make him continually retire and advance. I should, even at this early stage, take pains to secure a certain degree of life and speed in his execution, and I should be careful to vary the exercises, and never appeal to his intelligence at the risk of checking the activity of his movements. Sluggishness, I repeat, is a deadly foe, against which every avenue must be closed from the very first.