PUNT FOR A STANCHION GUN. 363 



If you are so fortunate as to get a line of birds, shoot 

 rather beyond the first of them, which will then be 

 taken by the lower shot. You may thus (with mould 

 shot) sweep the water from one to two hundred yards, 

 and possibly kill some of them all the way, from one of 

 these distances to the other. 



The advantage of a stanchion gun over a shoulder 

 duck-gun is far more than that of the latter over a 

 common sporting gun ; and so generally has this of late 

 years been found out, that, now-a-days, but little can 

 be done without one, on any part of the English coast. 



PUNT 

 FOR THE USE OF A STANCHION GUN. 



A gunning-punt, which is very narrow, although 

 it may row fast, is extremely dangerous, and will not 

 answer for going in shallow water, which is the grand 

 object, in order to get up to the birds before the tide 

 has flowed high enough to drive them off their legs, 

 and disperse them. 



All round-bottomed punts, such as are used at South- 

 ampton and Itchen Ferry, and most of those at East 

 Yarmouth, are on a bad construction, except merely 

 to sail about with a shoulder-gun ; because they have 

 such unsteady bearings, and are so built, that the gun, 

 and the man's head who fires it, must appear consider- 

 ably above the gunwale. The consequence is, that he 

 frightens away half the birds which he ought to kill ; 

 and can never regulate his gun for shooting in the dark. 

 In short, clincher and carvel built boats are only used 



