HOW TO LEARN TO SHOOT. 143 



any bird that flies under any circumstances, except it be 

 in very dense covert, which requires practice arranged 

 in the same manner, among bushes and shrubbery of 

 greater or less intricacy. 



By causing the assistant instead of throwing the turnip 

 into the air, to bowl it along the surface of the ground, in 

 all different angles and directions, up hill, down hill, over 

 the level, across knobby, hillocky ground, which will cause 

 it to bounce and bound into the air, between large trees or 

 among brushwood, the pupil will learn to hit it thus as 

 easily as when in the air, and will then be as certain on 

 running as on flying game. 



Beyond this, in the art of shooting, there is nothing to 

 be learned beyond coolness, steadiness, the immovable 

 nerve, the self-possession which nothing can disturb, the 

 inventive and instinctive resource, which can always 

 devise a mode of action to meet any emergency; which 

 comes, and can come, only from long use, and that habitua- 

 tion which becomes, in time, a second nature. 



It is certain, however, that any youth who has good 

 eyes, quick faculties, who is apt with his hands, not having, 

 as the ordinary saying is, all his fingers thumbs ; who 

 observes, thinks, and can control his nerves in a reasonable 

 degree, can if he will consent to be patient, to practise 

 precisely according to the rules which I have prescribed, 

 not trying to jump to conclusions before he has taken in 

 the rudiments and will become more than an ordinarily 

 good shot. 



That, if he be neither irrecoverably nervous and rash, 

 nor irretrievably slow and timid, if he have ordinarily 



