58 MANUAL FOE YOUNG SPORTSMEN. 



laminated steel barrel. The labor necessary to produce 

 them real, causes them of necessity to be dear. There- 

 fore, if a cheap one be offered to the merest tyro, let him 

 instantly reject it, without a second glance ; and as he 

 values his life, let him not fire it off. 



I do not, of course, mean to say that every cheap gun 

 must necessarily burst ; but I do say that, against each 

 one, severally, the odds are heavy that it will, at some 

 time or other, apart from any carelessness of the shooter, 

 fail in some part of its mechanism ; and then, woe to the 

 holder. No length of acquaintance with such a gun, no 

 goodness of its performance and I have seen some for 

 which I would not have given a dollar, and which I would 

 not have fired for a hundred, shoot more than passably^ 

 can justify the slightest confidence in it. On the con- 

 trary, the more times one may have fired it with impunity, 

 so much the greater are the odds against him that he will 

 do so again ; as any one would say of a person who should 

 undertake to draw the fusee of a live shell with his teeth, 

 or to lie down on a railroad track before the engine, in the 

 expectation of being picked up safely by the cow-catcher. 



By the word loiv-priced guns, I mean, as a general rule, 

 in reference to buying a safe and serviceable piece, any- 

 thing like new, with two barrels and the smallest show of 

 exterior ornament, cheaper than fifty dollars. 



Of the mere rubbish of the German, and nameless 

 English wholesale-murder-manufactories, sold at prices 

 varying from three to twenty dollars, it is almost useless 

 to write; since it is scarcely to be supposed that any one, 

 who reads, ever thinks of buying such. They are mere 



