arent, once a colonel of
volunteers--nor feeble to discharge the pea-bullet or barley-shot,
formidable to face and eyes; nor yet unfelt, at six paces, by hinder-end
of playmate, scornfully yet fearfully exposed. But the shooter soon
tires of such ineffectual trigger--and his soul, as well as his hair, is
set on fire by that extraordinary compound--Gunpowder. He begins with
burning off his eyebrows on the King's birthday; squibs and crackers
follow, and all the pleasures of the pluff. But he soon longs to let off
a gun--"and follows to the field some warlike lord"--in hopes of being
allowed to discharge one of the double-barrels, after Ponto has made his
last point, and the half-hidden chimneys of home are again seen smoking
among the trees. This is his first practice in firearms, and from that
hour he is--a Shooter.

Then there is in most rural parishes--and of rural parishes alone do we
condescend to speak--a pistol, a horse one, with a bit of silver on the
butt--perhaps one that originally served in the Scots Greys. It is
bought, or borrowed, by the young shooter, who begins firing first at
barn-doors, then at trees, and then at living things--a strange cur,
who, from his lolling tongue, may be supposed to have the hydrophobia--a
cat that has purred herself asleep on the sunny churchyard wall, or is
watching mice at their hole-mouths among the graves--a water-rat in the
mill-lead--or weasel that, running to his retreat in the wall, always
turns round to look at you--a goose wandered from his common in
disappointed love--or brown duck, easily mistaken by the unscrupulous
for a wild one, in pond remote from human dwelling, or on meadow by the
river-side, away from the clack of the muter-mill. The corby-crow, too,
shouted out of his nest on some tree lower than usual, is a good flying
mark to the more advanced class; or morning magpie, a-chatter at skreigh
of day close to the cottage door among the chickens; or a flock of
pigeons wheeling overhead on the stubble-field, or sitting so thick
together that every stock is blue with tempting plumage.

But the pistol is discharged for a fowling-piece--brown and rusty, with
a slight crack probably in the muzzle, and a lock out of all proportion
to the barrel. Then the young shooter aspires at halfpennies thrown up
into the air--and generally hit, for there is never wanting an apparent
dent in copper metal; and thence he mounts to the glancing and skimming
swallow, a household b