HOW TO LEARN To ‘sHOOT. 143 
any bird that flies under any circumstances, except it be 
in very dense covert, which requires practice arranged 
in the same manner, among bushes and shrubbery of 
greatcr or less intricacy. 
By causing the assistant instead of throwing the turnip 
into the air, to bowl it along the surface of the ground, in 
all different angles and directions, up hill, down hill, over 
the level, across knobby, hillocky ground, which will cause 
it to bounce and bound into the air, between large trees or 
among brushwood, the pupil will learn to hit it thus as 
easily as when in the air, and will then be as certain on 
running as on flying game. 
Beyond this, in the art of shooting, there is nothing to 
be learned beyond coolness, steadiness, the immovable 
nerve, the self-possession which nothing can disturb, the 
inventive and instinctive resource, which can always 
devise a mode of action to meet any emergency; which 
comes, and can come, only from long use, and that habitua- 
tion which becomes, in time, a second nature. 
It is certain, however, that any youth who has good 
eyes, quick faculties, who is apt with his hands, not having, 
as the ordinary saying is, all his fingers thumbs; who 
observes, thinks, and can control his nerves in a reasonable 
degree, can—if he will consent to be patient, to practise 
precisely according to the rules which I have prescribed, 
not trying to jump to conclusions before he has taken in 
the rudiments—and will become more than an ordinarily 
good shot. 
That, if he be neither irrecoverably nervous and rash, 
nor irretrievably slow and timid, if he have ordinarily 
