The next day Tig went home to his own village and got some of his neighbours to help him build a new hut and bring into it the necessary things. Then he went again to the Lake Village, taking presents for Eira’s father and mother, and he asked Eira to be his wife. Then they were married according to the custom of her people, and there was a great feast at the wedding, and the men ran races, and they all danced many dances. And afterwards Tig took Eira home to the new hut in his own village. [Illustration] _Chapter the Twenty-eighth_ _DICK AND HIS FRIENDS: The Boys’ Bows and Arrows_ WHEN the boys went out after this reading, they got their bows and arrows. By this time the bows were finished. Dick had given to each of the others two arrows out of his set that came from London. These were well made with blunt metal heads fitting like caps. Besides these Joe had made himself six arrows, and the other two four each. For heads they had nails, filed down flat on two sides to make them fit into the shaft, and sharpened at the point. The great difficulty had been to get straight sticks, and though they agreed that it was not a real hunter’s way of doing it, they had cut lengths from a thin piece of hard-wood board, with a fine saw, and then trimmed and sand-papered these to make them round and smooth. To fix in the heads they made a cut, deep enough to take the nail, and then wrapped it with fine string and glued this well over. When they had fixed the feathers, the arrows were complete, and each marked his own. Dick had a V for his mark, Joe a cut between two dots, and David a dot between two cuts. The gardener made them a target out of bands of straw, and they practised at it a good deal. But one day they made up their minds to try to shoot something that might be called “game,” and they went off to the heath. Each took a different way, but they agreed to meet at the hut afterwards, with whatever they should have bagged. Joe went off to a place near the edge of the wood, where there were generally rabbits playing about, and his plan was to creep up near enough to get a shot at once, if he could do so without scaring them, but if not, to hide among the bushes and wait for them coming out of their burrows.