ally intercepted the sight at a
hundred or a hundred and fifty yards. With the extension of Caucasian
empire to the Plains came an extension of the range of vision, which
necessitated an advance in the range of the rifle. The weapon of
Sharpe figured for the first time in the van when the woods of
Missouri were passed and the open plains of Kansas reached. There
its office was, unfortunately, the strife of white against white. The
largest possible range, the greatest possible number of shots in a
given time, were demanded in a war wherein the opposing armies were
seldom within five miles of each other, or more than one man hurt to
five hundred charges of powder burned. How the Lenni Lenape must have
opened their eyes at this reproduction of the drama of a century ago
when the whites, English and French, were fighting each other for the
possession of the Delawares' lands in Pennsylvania! The feeble remnant
of the compatriots of Logan had "moved on," under pressure of a very
urgent police, a thousand miles westward to a reservation not a great
deal larger, when portioned out, than that last reservation allotted
to all men; and the pale-faces who had hung upon his track he now saw
fighting for that.

From its warlike aspect it is pleasant to turn to the contributions
of the rifle to peaceful amusement, if not peaceful industry.
Contemptuously giving the go-by to its minutest phase in this
field--the "parlor rifle," with a target against the chimney-piece
or meandering, in feline form, along our neighbor's roof-tree--we go
forth, with Snider and sunrise, to the forest fastness. Our companions
throng, tall, bronzed, close-knit and sinewy, true children of
the four-grooved, from frosty Caucasus, the Hartz, the Alps, the
Dovrafjeld, the Grampians, the Himmalaya, the Adirondack, the
Alleghany, the Nevada. The chamois, the ibex, the red deer, the
Virginia deer, the wapiti, the gour, or the royal tiger may be the
game in hand. The tiger we are accustomed to associate exclusively
with the dank jungles of Lower India, but he climbs, each summer, the
great passes of Central Asia, "the roof of the world," and makes his
way to the frontier of Siberia, beyond 50 deg. north.

The equipment of the mountain-rifleman is characterized by simplicity
and a strict attention to business. The nature of the ground over
which he works inexorably prescribes this. The superfluities of the
fox-hunter or the partridge-shooter with his dog-cart canno