68 MANUAL FOR YOUNG SPORTSMEN. 
chanics, John and Patrick Mullin of. New York, while I 
have seen and handled guns at 75 and 50 dollars, by the 
former of the two makers last named, which I would have 
preferred to any hardware-shop Birmingham gun, by a 
nameless maker, with all its paraphernalia, at any possible 
price. 
His fifty-dollar guns, of 30 inch barrel and [4 gauge, 
are, in point of real utility, excellent, serviceable, cheap, 
and perfectly safe arms. The purchaser can see them in 
the rough, before they are filed or finished, and see of 
what metal and stuff they are made; or, if he be at a dis- 
tance, can commission his friend or agent to do so for him. 
The gun will not possess the finish, the lock will not work 
with the same unimprovable oiliness, soundness and clear- 
ness, as the lock of a three-hundred-dollar imported gun, 
nor will its barrels, probably, throw the shot with the 
same equality and regularity of distribution or force. Its 
details will not be as accurate, nor its joints and fittings 
as unimpeachable. But, if held straight, it will kill its 
game, sure and dead, at thirty-eight or forty yards; and 
what is much better, it certainly will not kill its owner— 
which, be it said, with all deference to Messieurs the im- 
porters thereof, cannot be predicated of any gun that ever 
was imported at any such price. 
Every dollar over 50 and up to 150, will produce a 
dollar’s worth of actual improvement, and intrinsic value 
in the article; but when we get beyond the hundred and 
fifty, the farther advance is for external show. I know 
nothing beyond that, but if it seem good, to try Richards’ 
at £85 sterling, with the duties added—though I would 
