128 A BIRD COLLECTOR'S MEDLEY. 
CHAPTER XXYV. 
UNWSW AIL Sls OWS. 
THE reader who, on seeing this title, has resigned himself to some 
tall stories on the subject of long-distance shots can rest assured that 
he will escape them. I, too, have heard the yarn of the sportsman who, 
firing at a Partridge across a river, killed also a trout which rose at that 
moment, and then, in amazement at his exploit, staggered backwards and 
sat down upon a hare! I have also heard of a veteran shooter’s six hundred 
odd Starlings killed at a single discharge, and who am I that I should 
seek to measure swords with these leviathans? A collector, moreover, has 
a soul above such details as the number of yards at which he bagged his 
specimen; it is enough for him that he has got, or missed, his bird. 
Still, I have seen strange shots made with guns in my time; yes, and 
with other implements than guns, for the first unusual shot that I remember 
was made, not with a gun, but with a catapult, and it was as unpleasant 
as it was unusual. I had started a theory that it would be possible to shoot 
more accurately—no minor consideration with a catapult—if we held the 
fork much more forward instead of straight up. Full of zeal for my invention, 
and anxious to prove its. excellence, I rushed into the garden to test my 
theory on the first Sparrow that came my way. I returned with equal 
precipitation, bawling for boracic-lint and a bandage. ‘The shot in its eager- 
ness to reach the victim had taken a short cut through the top of my 
thumb, and left a long smooth furrow behind it. 
Our catapults had not long yielded to the superior destructive power 
of a ‘410 collector's gun, when, one soft summer’s evening, just as it was 
turning dusk, I espied from my bedroom window the substantial form of a 
Brown Owl, seated placidly on one of the chimneys of a neighbour’s house 
in Winchester. A raptorial bird just across the road, and we the possessors 
of a genuine gun! Flesh and blood could not have resisted. Out came 
the weapon; for a moment it rested on the window-bar, and then a roar 
as of thunder echoed through every cranny of the Cathedral Close. Out 
rushed a footman from one house, a cook and two housemaids from the 
