150 BIRD-LIFE OF THE BORDERS. 



fowl are not so simple and unsuspicious as he had ignorantly 

 assumed ; that, in point of fact, he is wholly impotent to 

 approach them ; moreover, nineteen shots out of twenty are 

 not at dense masses, but at very small companies often 

 under a dozen. He will rind that a gunning-punt is not so 

 easily held in hand as may have appeared to he the case ; and 

 that a stanchion-gun is not only a somewhat unwieldy weapon 

 to manage, but that unless it is managed (and managed, too, 

 with a degree of skill which only a fairly long apprenticeship 

 will secure) , it proves in his hands of no more effect than a 

 barrel-organ. 



Some of the allusions to the use of a stanchion-gun as 

 " murder made easy," rather remind one of the cartoons 

 which so delighted the Parisian mob in the summer of 1870. 

 A French soldier was represented turning the handle of a 

 mitrailleuse, the background strewn with Teutonic dead. 

 Jean had just received orders to cease firing, and turning 

 round, innocently asks, " What ! are there no more left to 

 kill?" Fowl too, like Prussians, are easily enough killed 

 on paper, with a big gun ; but in actual practice, our contem- 

 ners might find these weapons as deceptive as the mitrailleuses 

 themselves afterwards proved at Woerth and at Gravelotte. 



The successful handling of a stanchion-gun, so far from 

 being the simple matter inferred, is a profession capable of 

 considerable development in experienced hands ; and to use 

 these guns effectively is at least as difficult as any ordinary 

 shooting from the shoulder. By effective use I mean the 

 placing of the charge, at precisely the right moment, at the 

 point of greatest advantage. A " duffer" may manage now 

 and then to kill a pair or two of fowl in a haphazard sort 

 of fashion ; but the difference between him and the skilled 

 gunner is, that the latter would probably in the same 

 circumstances have bagged a dozen. 



One factor in perpetuating the erroneous impressions 

 alluded to is the difficulty of putting down in black and white 

 the salient features of the punt-gunner's craft, or of diagnos- 

 ing the points which constitute his skill. They can hardly, 

 indeed, be reduced to paper, any more than dexterity in this 

 or in any other sport can be acquired except by practice and 



