Saturday, April the 6th, 2013

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William Tell : Fourth Statement Of Particulars

We have previously had William Tell's first, second, and third statements of particulars. Here is the fourth.

I speak as one who, in all good conscience, for better or worse, because it seemed, at that time and in that place to be the best thing to do, and not just the best, but the most meet, the most valiant, if done with both dash and verve commingled with rectitude and punctilio, in front of my countrymen there gathered as witnesses, that they might bruit my name far and wide and, yea, tell their children and their children's children so that my name and my deed go ringing down the centuries, here in Alpine Switzerland and further abroad, across all corners of the globe, I speak, I say, and these words too will ring down the ages and across the world, as one who, gloriously, and patriotically, and with pinpoint precision and an eagle eye, if I say so myself, though I am a self-effacing archer not given to boasting about my abilities, even so, by any objective measure one must acknowledge my feat, and I blush as I tell it, beetroot red, ah beetroot!, king of vegetables, at least for some, but it is not a vegetable of which I speak, but a fruit, a fruit I placed atop the head of my son, and then stepped back, and hoisted my crossbow, and shot my arrow, and clove that piece of fruit in twain, while leaving my son untouched, unharmed, though, it has to be said, a mite traumatised, as they would say in the psychobabble of a post-Freudian universe, my son crying “Papa! Papa! What on earth did you think you were doing, and what if you had missed the fruit and your arrow plunged into me, your little son?”, at which I strode toward him and clapped him on the back, and told him to buck up and not to be a ninny, and I assured him that his name too would resound through the years, as the son of William Tell, but I was wrong about that, was I not?, for it seems few, if any, remember the name of my son, which was Walter.