468 AMERICAN GAME BIRD SHOOTING 
to hard-luck stories, which oftenest have their origin 
in incompetency; and the other man, who might be 
sympathetic, right or wrong, is more than likely to 
have troubles enough of his own. 
There are shooters who have a belief that they can 
produce better cartridges loaded by hand than those 
made by machinery. Such belief is fallacious. Given 
like materials, the machine-loaded cartridge is likely 
to be the better of the two. To a certainty it will have 
more uniform loading, as the pressures on the wad- 
ding will be automatically alike. This uniformity is 
beyond the compass of the hand. The kind and quality 
of wadding, however, is an important factor in the ef- 
fectiveness of any load, hence a well wadded hand load 
may surpass a poorly wadded machine load; but this 
is a matter of material and not of methods. 
For the 16 and 20 gauges the loads of shot should 
be comparatively light, from three-quarters of an ounce 
to one ounce, with from two to two and a half drams 
of bulk powder, or a corresponding quantity of dense 
powder. There should be no attempt to arbitrarily 
make the smaller gauges equal to the 12 in weight 
of ammunition. As already suggested, the advan- 
tage of the smaller bores is in their lightness, and 
therefore in their fitness for upland shooting, which 
does not exact such hard killing qualities in a gun as 
does wild fowl shooting. 
The gun should be selected with a view to its fit- 
ness for the special shooting of the owner, his physical 
strength and skilful capabilities, which, summed up, 
