MY FIRST FLINTLOCK 
NEARLY everybody has a hobby of some sort. Your 
business may not satisfy, but your hobby always fills 
the bill. There’s a lot of satisfaction in a good healthy 
hobby. It may be collecting coins, postage stamps, or 
birds’ eggs. Raising blooded horses or cattle, or even 
the humble hen. Possibly it’s a scheme to aid your fel- 
low-man, or to own a magazine to give free rein to your 
ideas of what grooves the world should runin. If you 
are wealthy and tabooed by society, a hobby for collect- 
ing mortgages on the homes of society leaders gives 
both personal satisfaction as well as good financial re- 
turns; something unusual in hobbies, as they are gener- 
ally both costly and wasteful. 
My hobby is firearms. Very few of us who have this 
hobby can pass a sporting goods store window without 
stopping to look in. All manner and fashions of guns 
and pistols, old or new, have a never failing fascination 
at all times and in all places. 
My first firearm, a brass-barreled pistol, costing six 
bits, was purchased at the age of eleven. It was a far 
cry from this pistol to a fourteen-hundred-dollar shot- 
gun, the finest made-to-order gun I could get. . No such 
cost could possibly be put into plain gun. It was orna- 
mented from stock to muzzle. Five hundred dollars’ 
worth of gold was used in inlaid work, while the expense 
for a twelvemonth of skilled labor was as much more. 
A running golden stag with branching antlers, pursued 
16 
