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The place was fitted up as a study, and a curtain shut off a smaller room suggestive of a bed within; while over the chimney-piece were foils opposite single-sticks; boxing-gloves hung in pairs, bruised and swollen, as if suffering from their last knocking about; a cavalry sabre and a dragoon officer's helmet were on the wall opposite the window.
There were collected and piled up all Albert's successive caprices, hunting-horns, bass-viols, flutes a whole orchestra, for Albert had had not a taste but a fancy for music; easels, palettes, brushes, pencils for music had been succeeded by painting; foils, boxing-gloves, broadswords, and single-sticks for, following the example of the fashionable young men of the time, Albert de Morcerf cultivated, with far more perseverance than music and drawing, the three arts that complete a dandy's education, i.e., fencing, boxing, and single-stick; and it was here that he received Grisier, Cook, and Charles Leboucher.
On one side of the fireplace two thigh bones were stacked; on the other a pair of foils, two basket-hilted single-sticks, and a set of boxing-gloves. On a shelf in a convenient niche was a small stock of general literature, which appeared to have been considerably more thumbed than the works upon medicine.
There was a billiard table, and foils, and boxing-gloves, and single-sticks, and basket-sticks, and implements for all sorts of less athletic games at which ladies can play. "Why, Ernest, you live in a perfect paradise of a home," exclaimed Buttar, as at last they reached the sleeping-rooms which Mrs Bracebridge had appropriated to her young guests.
Archie or Wunsch. After dinner they were too restless to endure the ranch house any longer, and ran away to the canyon to practice with single-sticks. Fred carried a slicker and a sweater, and he made Thea wear one of the rubber hats that hung in Biltmer's gun-room. As they crossed the pasture land the clumsy slicker kept catching in the lacings of his leggings. "Why don't you drop that thing?"
On the third day there was a set battle in the morning between fifteen men on each side, armed with the usual buckler or small shield, and stout single-sticks instead of swords. This combat excited more interest than all the duels that had preceded it; the crowd almost broke down the barriers, and the cheering and cries of encouragement could be heard upon the hills.
One company began twisting and turning and leaping on the poles, while Ernest got his followers to practise with their basket-sticks and single-sticks. Then he proposed a drill, and they all fell in and went through their exercises with as much precision as if Sergeant Dibble himself had been present.
Have ye not a pair of fists apiece, or if that could not content ye, are there not single-sticks enow in these woods? I've a mind to take my ramrod in hand and show ye the virtue of a good stick, but I promise you that if not I, some other shall give you a lesson you'll not forget. Come, march!" "I'm shrewdly slashed in the leg, Captain," expostulated Dotey; "and fear me I cannot walk." "Ay?
When skylarking together on the upper deck one evening, Mick and another fellow caught up a couple of cutlasses that had been left inadvertently lying about the deck, and they commenced pointing and cutting and slashing at one another with the keen-edged weapons, just as if they had been mere basket-hilted single-sticks, a rap from which would have done no damage beyond a bruise.
I'll tell you what I'm going to do, Thea," Fred dusted his hands and began tucking in the blouse of his shirt, "I'm going to make some single-sticks and teach you to fence. You'd be all right there. You're light and quick and you've got lots of drive in you. I'd like to have you come at me with foils; you'd look so fierce," he chuckled.
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