n a pellet of shot, will cause it to leave the charge, and fly
off at a tangent. I was once shooting in the fens of the Isle of Ely,
and fired at a mallard sixty or sixty-five yards off, with double B
shot, when to my great amazement a workman--digging peat at about the
same distance from me with the bird, but at least ninety yards to the
right of the mallard--roared out lustily that I had killed him. I saw
that the drake was knocked over as dead as a stone, and consequently
laughed at the fellow, and set it down as a cool trick to extort money,
not uncommon among the fen men, as applied to members of the University.
I had just finished loading, and my retriever had just brought in the
dead bird, which was quite riddled, cut up evidently by the whole body
of the charge--both the wings broken, one in three places, one leg
almost dissevered, and several shots in the neck and body--when up came
my friend, and sure enough he was hit--one pellet had struck him on the
cheek bone, and was imbedded in the skin. Half a crown, and a lotion of
whiskey--not applied to the part, but taken inwardly--soon proved a
sovereign medicine, and picking out the shot with the point of a needle,
I found a hole in it big enough to admit a pin's head, and about the
twentieth part of an inch in depth. This I should think is proof enough
for you--but, besides this, I have seen bullets in pistol-shooting play
strange vagaries, glancing off from the target at all sorts of queer
angles."

"Well! well!" replied Frank, "my rifle shoots true enough for me--true
enough to kill generally--and who the deuce can be at the bother of your
pragmatical preparations! I am sure it might be said of you, as it was
of James the First, of most pacific and pedantic memory, that you are
'Captain of arts and Clerk of arms'--at least you are a very pedant in
gunnery."

"No! no!" said A---; "you're wrong there altogether, Master Forester;
there is nothing on earth that makes so great a difference in
sportsmanship as the observation of small things. I don't call him a
sportsman who can walk stoutly, and kill well, unless he can give causes
for effects--unless he knows the haunts and habits both of his game and
his dogs--unless he can give a why for every wherefore!"

"Then devil a bit will you ever call me one,"--answered Frank--"For I
can't be at the trouble of thinking about it."

"Stuff--humbug--folly"--interrupted Archer--"you know a great deal
better than that--and