Excerpt from Rifles and Rifle Shooting The sword has been a practically useless arm all these three hundred years, yet it is car ried by military men and others simply be cause of its tremendous hold upon the imagina tion. The knight and his war-horse, his lance and his great two-handed sword are alive to day, just as they were a thousand years ago, though his immense blade has dwindled in modern hands to a mere toy to be carried on parade - for four hundred years popular imagination has kept it hung to the soldier's waist after its work was done. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.