454 AMERICAN GAME BIRD SHOOTING 
unable to continue to do this work their services are 
no longer required by the people who hire them. 
In old times the best shots that we used to know 
were the market shooters. Many of them were men 
who worked at some trade when they were not shoot- 
ing for a living, their muscles were hard, their health 
good, and they were in the pink of physical condi- 
tion. When they took up their guns in summer or 
autumn they shot all the time, and their constant prac- 
tice, together with their strength and hardiness, made 
them most destructive of the game they followed. In 
the same way to-day, we find that the best shots along 
the south Atlantic coast are the gunners who shoot 
ducks for the market. Farming during the spring and 
summer, fishing in late summer and early autumn, 
and gunning through the autumn and winter, they 
are always in splendid condition, and always in good 
practice. 
Very different is the case of the city or office man, 
who perhaps spends fifty weeks of the year at his desk, 
walking each day only a few blocks. When his vaca- 
tion comes he sets out on his shooting trip, and is sur- 
prised and disappointed to find that he can neither 
tramp nor shoot. Why should he be able to do either ? 
It is not by doing a thing half a dozen times a year 
that one acquires skill in it. The man who is to under- 
take tasks requiring skill, muscular effort, long wind, 
or endurance of any kind, must prepare himself for 
the task which lies before him. 
As I wrote some years ago, in “American Duck 
