58 MANUAL FOR 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 low-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 
