126 MANUAL FOR YOUNG SPORTSMEN. 
What is lost of elegance in appearance, in this mode, 
will be more than overbalanced, whatever the gunmakers 
may say to the contrary, in precision of fire. 
And with these brief remarks on the rifle, and the 
mode of choosing it, I shall pass, with no farther pause, 
to the consideration of the modus operandi—the how to 
use the gun of whatever kind in the field; how to learn 
to shoot deliberately, accurately and correctly as to prin- 
ciples; how to kill on the wing, or at full speed, with loose 
shot, and how at rest, or in rapid motion with the single 
ball. ; 
This, after all, is the whole that I can attempt by pre- 
cept. Some men take to shooting almost by instinct, as a 
thoroughbred setter does to pointing and backing, de race, 
as the French have it, by the accident of birth; others 
cannot by any toil of practice or amount of indoctrination 
be tutored into acquiring it. The eye, the finger, the 
nerve, the temper, have all something, more or less, to do 
with it; and, no more than a poet, doI believe that a 
crack shot can be made, save by the special ordinance of 
nature. ! 
Still if one cannot be made a poet, he can at least be 
taught the difference between blank verse and rhyme, 
between Milton’s Lycidas and Christy’s “ Old Uncle 
Ned;” and, if he can never be brought to cut down his 
twenty consecutive shots, clean and quick in close covert, 
with the sang froid of an artist, he can, at least, be taught 
to fire his gun off without killing himself, his neighbor, or 
his dog; and, unless he be the cluinsiest aud slowest of 
the human kind, to kill a fair proportion of his shots 
