“When that sun-ray tips it with red, I’ll see if I can’t hit it. I’ve hit a better mark before now.”
Now, the mannikins, as her ladyship called them, were the little figures carved on the panels of the walls all around the Cedar Room, which was of a rather lop-sided shape, neither square nor oblong, but a little of all three fitted into the uppermost part of an angle of the mansion which jutted far over the moat. These panels were very old, at least two hundred years, and the room was as ancient, but its walls were as stout and sturdy as on the day they were made. The panels were of Flemish carving, and they represented the gods and goddesses of heathen mythology. There was Jupiter hurling lightning from his throne, Juno with her peacocks, Vulcan hammering away on his anvil, and Minerva sitting up very majestically in her helmet and coat of mail, holding her shield. The faces, however, of these far-famed personages were far from being like what Charles had always imagined of them when his father had related tales about them to him, as often he had done. According to this description of them, which sometimes the King would read out loud to him from the poetry-history of Homer, they were beautiful, even glorious, to look upon, but these mannikins were as ugly and clumsy almost as if they were made of gilt gingerbread. They were pretty well as broad as they were long, dressed in jerkins, or muffled in cloaks and full skirts, and their faces were almost all nose, that is to say, where they had any at all, for many of the noses had stuck out so far that they had got chipped off or worn flat. Why the carver of all these gentry had made such a point of their noses puzzled Charles, who for the first few days of his living in the Cedar Room was certainly immensely amused with this silent, droll company; but after a while he got cross with their dull faces.
“If they were real,” he said one day to Wynkin, “what blockheads they would be!”
“And blockheads they are now,” had been Wynkin’s reply.
And if there was one of the wooden folk Charles found more irritating than another, it was Madam Minerva. She sat up so prim and cross-looking and her nose poking out from under her helmet, bigger even than that of great Jove himself; or so it seemed to Charles, as he lay listlessly watching the afternoon sun-rays pouring in at the lattice, and listening half glad, half sad to the piping of the happy merle in the elm-tree, and the voices of the harvesters far down below in the fields.
How he longed to be with them and watch the loading of those last sheaves into the big carts, and how stiflingly hot the Cedar Room was, and how particularly forbidding and disagreeable goddess Minerva there looked, and how uncomfortable and heavy must be that scale armor of hers, and that shield, and the helmet, not to speak of such a nose. Ah! And, stretching out his hand over the arm of the chair, Charles picked up his toy bow, which lay with his own gilt pasteboard cuirass and tin helmet and wooden broadsword and other weapons on the floor, and setting the bow with a bolt, he sat waiting. “Yes,” he murmured, with a wag of his head, and setting his lips tight, “I won’t put up with her any longer, her and her nose. And when that sun-ray tips it with red, as in a minute or two it will, I—I’ll see if I can’t hit it. I’ve hit a better mark before now.” Then he waited and watched, and the crimson gleams crept on and on across the carved panels, and—whizz! went the string, snapping right back across Charles’s own nose so sharply that it stung him and he shut his eyes for a minute. When he opened them he beheld a strange and most unexpected sight.
