144 MANUAL FOR YOUNG SPORTSMEN. 
quick eyesight, quick wits, and quick hands, he must be, 
if he obey orders, beyond the possibility of failure. 
If he be unusually stout of nerve, cool of temper, 
rapid of sight, sure of observation, and apt of hand, he 
will probably become as successful as a marksman and a 
shot, as he would at any thing else to which he should 
turn his superior faculties. 
If, however, he be purblind, a blinker, clumsy and 
helpless with his hands, dull-witted, weak-nerved, timid 
and a dolt; I should strongly urge it on him and his 
friends, that he should let the gun alone, for he is never 
like to do much with it, unless it be to shoot his friend, 
his sweetheart, or himself—none of which are the legiti- 
mate, though I am sorry to say they are but too frequently 
the casual, ends of amateur gunnery. 
For learning to shoot with the rifle, a mode of prac- 
tice must be adopted almost diametrically opposite to 
that prescribed above. 
The charge of a shot gun, expanding in width in pro- 
portion as it increases its distance from the muzzle of the 
piece when it is charged, will cover, at forty paces from a 
strong, well-shooting gun, a circle of a yard in diameter, 
with its pellets so regularly distributed, that any bird 
found within that circle must receive two or three missiles, 
and sent so strongly that any one of these must break a 
pinion bone. At sixty paces the circumference of the shot 
will be greatly enlarged arid the force nearly as greatly 
diminished ; still a good gun ought to kill a bird to a cer- 
tainty in the centre of the circle, and generally any where 
within it. 
