familiarity with its merits, till it becomes so near
akin to affection that I should find it hard to part with one which had
served me well, and was associated in my mind with adventures whose
interest was derived from its successful performance.

The first piece of advice I would offer to a novice in search of a gun
is, "Don't be in a hurry."

The demand is such that a buyer is constantly urged to close a bargain
by the assurance that it may be his last chance to secure such a weapon
as the one he is examining,--and great numbers of mere toys have thus
been forced upon purchasers, who, if they ever practise enough to
acquire a taste for shooting, will send them to the auction-room, and
make another effort to procure a gun suited to their wants. Several new
patterns of guns have been produced within the last year, some of which
are very attractive in their appearance, and to an inexperienced person
seem to possess sufficient power for any service they may ever be called
upon to perform. They are well finished, compact, light, and pretty.
A Government Inspector, indeed, would be apt to make discoveries of
"malleable iron," which would cause their instant rejection, but which
in reality constitutes no ground of objection to guns whose parts are
not required to be interchangeable. They might be described as "well
adapted for ladies' use, or for boys learning to shoot;" but it gave me
a sickening sense of the inexperience of many a noble-hearted youth who
may have entered the service from the purest motives of patriotism, when
a dealer, who was exhibiting one of these parlor-weapons, with a calibre
no larger than a good-sized pea, informed me that he had sold a great
many to young officers, being so light that they could be carried slung
upon the back almost as easily as a pistol. It is with no such kid-glove
tools as these that so many of our officers have been picked off by
Southern sharp-shooters. At a long range they are useless; at close
quarters, which is the only situation in which an officer actually needs
fire-arms, a revolver is far preferable. I know of no rifle so well
adapted to an officer's use as Colt's carbine,--of eighteen or
twenty-one inch barrel, and not less than 44/100 of an inch calibre. It
may be depended upon for six hundred yards, the short barrel renders
its manipulation easy in a close fight, and the value of the repeating
principle at such a time can be estimated only by that of life.

In a p