288 © TRAP-SHOOTING. 
\ . 
Ci.) CH PRER aah 
TRAP-SHOOTING. 
TuE amusement of trap-shooting is pursued in the 
Northern States, on the margins of the western 
lakes—-as some eminent marksmen of Buffalo and 
Niagara Falls can testify—and on the sea-coast—as 
some famous matches at Islip would prove. It is not 
a field sport; it is hardly a sport at all; and a pigeon 
is not, properly speaking, a game-bird, in spite of the 
instances quoted. If this work were to be confined 
strictly to its professed objects, this chapter would 
have to be excluded ; but for the reason that it belongs 
nowhere else, that an account of this peculiar style 
of shooting will be useful to many sportsmen, and 
that no published book contains any information on 
the subject, the writer has presumed to collate the 
experience of his friends rather than of himself—for 
he does not pretend to much skill in this particular 
art—and to offer it to the sporting public. 
Trap-shooting, although quite an ungrammatical 
expression, is perfectly understood as a sporting 
term, having acquired a conventional meaning; it 
signifies neither shooting at a trap, which its con- 
struction implies, nor shooting out of a trap, but 
shooting at a bird—generally a pigeon—released from 
atrap. Although not a highly scientific sport, and 
somewhat open to the charge of cruelty, it has its 
devotees; and certainly, amid a crowd of spectators 
