Twenty-five yards in front of each pavilion, two targets were placed, fifty yards apart, so that, after sending all their arrows at one, the archers might walk up to it and gather them, and, taking their stand by it, shoot back to the other; thus alternately reversing the direction of their shots, and adding healthful exercise to their graceful pastime. The targets were both very beautiful, and gay with colours; being round wooden shields half an inch in thickness and three feet in diameter, with four circles painted on the faces: the outer white, with a green border; the next black; the next within it orange; and the inner circle red, encompassing a gold centre. They were elevated, at a slight angle, twenty inches from the ground, on a light frame resembling a painter's easel.
Midway between the targets, but safely placed several paces back from the erratic path of the arrows, was erected beneath an ancient linden-tree a sylvan throne, surmounted by a canopy of silk, elaborately worked with the needle to represent Diana, with her nymphs and hounds, pursuing a herd of deer with flights of arrows. This was the seat of the umpire of the sports--Katrine, the lovely Countess of Bellamont. Altogether, it was an imposing and gorgeous scene; and, with its stern castle rising boldly from the verdant lawn topped with battlements and towers; with its boundary on the north side, of green, dark old woods, and the calm, deep bay beneath, with a yacht sleeping on its bosom; with its extended prospect of the illimitable sea forever breathing with a mysterious life, the field of archery at Castle Cor, for the natural beauty of the spot and the taste displayed in its adornment, has doubtless had no parallel in the annals of archery.
Scarcely had the echoes of old Cormac's horn died away in the forest, startling many a stately stag to flight, when the castle poured forth its gay throng of archers towards the lists. In their midst was the Countess of Bellamont, escorted by a bodyguard of young archeresses. She was then in the prime and beauty of ripe womanhood: at that delightful age when the wife and mother, all the charms of mind and person fully developed and refined by taste and elegant culture, fascinates by a thousand nameless graces, and captivates and enslaves even the youthful crowd that sigh at the feet of her lovely daughter of seventeen--the age that leaves one in doubt whether beautiful women arrive at the zenith of their beauty and power under five-and-thirty.