Captain Iboratto 1Ross 259 



Ross's style of pistol-shooting, however, was not of 

 the sort that makes a man a deadly duellist He was 

 a slow, steady shot who dwelt upon his aim ; and at 

 quick snap-shooting he was not great, perhaps because 

 he did not care to practise it. But he never lost a pistol 

 match in his life. On one occasion he was challenged 

 to shoot fifty shots at a target by a Spanish gentleman 

 who prided himself on his deadly aim. The match, for 

 50 a side, came off at the Red House, Battersea. The 

 distance was very short, only twelve yards, the target a 

 common playing-card, on the back of which was marked 

 a bull's-eye exactly the size of a sixpence. Ross won 

 easily, and in his last twenty-five shots hit the bull's- 

 eye twenty-three times. 



But it was at long-range pistol-shooting that he ex- 

 celled. He once shot a match, pistol against rifle, with 

 Lord Vernon at a hundred yards and won. And on 

 the same day won .100 from Henry Baring, who bet 

 ten to one that Ross would not hit his hat with a pistol 

 bullet at a hundred yards. On several occasions he 

 killed deer, both roe and fallow, with a pistol at distances 

 over fifty yards. 



Captain Ross's sons Edward (the first winner of the 

 Queen's Prize at Wimbledon), Hercules, and Colin were 

 all fine rifle-shots both at game and at targets, but none 

 of them was anything like the equal of their father 

 at all-round shooting. 



There was another and a very different art in which 

 Captain Ross was also an expert. When in 1839 

 Mr. Henry Fox Talbot first made public his mode of 

 multiplying photographic impressions by producing a 



