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Updated: June 15, 2025
A review of the outdoor sports and relics of former days would scarcely be complete without some mention of swords and rapiers, which were once commonly worn, along with pistols, alas! too frequently in use when a hasty word called forth a challenge to a duel. Many of these old swords are rusty, but they frequently show marks of former use.
Scarcely had the flash of thin rapiers crossing each other by moonlight begun to gleam in the street when Morano appeared beside them and stood there watching. He had bought his bacon and gone straight to the house with the balcony.
Have you polished rapiers? Perhaps he wouldn't even answer at all, and we saw just now how he acts. His glance slipped past me like an eel, and he had wax in his ears. Whether I reproach, or a cur yelps at him, is all the same to his lordship.
The men wanted to go out pleasuring and omit their drill, but we forced them to go through it, Junker von Warmond, Duivenvoorde and I. Who knows how soon it may be necessary to show what we can do. Roland, my fore man, such imprudence is like a cudgel, against which one can do nothing with Florentine rapiers, clever tierce and quarto. My wheat is destroyed by the hail."
It had a marvellous paper of branching trees and parrots and red-robed Chinamen, in the taste of the morning room downstairs, a carved four-post bed, a grate adorned with purplish Dutch tiles, an array of family miniatures over the mantelpiece, and on a neighbouring wall a rack of old swords and rapiers.
Their glances crossed like rapiers for the flash of an instant. She turned to the hammock bearers. "Lie down!" she commanded. Then to the impassive Nubian, "The kiboko! I suppose," she observed politely to Kingozi, "that you will admit these men should be punished, and that you will permit me to do so?" "Surely they should be punished; that goes without saying."
Even our swords were similar long, leather-sheathed rapiers with dead gold hilts. Under my doublet I laced the steel vest Bernheim brought me. It and one other were made by a famous Milan armorer three hundred years ago, Bernheim said; and the two had been in his family ever since. And, so far as he knew, there were no others like them in all Europe; not even in the Museums.
Like two serpents their rapiers engaged in the candle-light. The soundless blades crossed and glittered. Then one of them flickered in a narrow circle, and the brother's rapier went spinning from his hand across the room. Young Cardinnock lowered his point at once, and his adversary stepped back a couple of paces.
The harquebus or hak-bus, hook-gun, so called because of the hook in the front part of the barrel to give steadiness in firing was much lighter, was discharged from the hand; and carried bullets of twenty-four to the pound. Both weapons had matchlocks. The pike was eighteen feet long at least, and pikemen as well as halberdsmen carried rapiers.
I took the sword, which was a thin two-edged one, and seemed to be made of very good steel; it put me in mind of the blades which I had seen at Toledo the guard was very slight like those of all rapiers, and the hilt the common old-fashioned English officer's hilt there was no rust on the blade, and it still looked a dangerous sword.
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