152 MANUAL FOR YOUNG SPORTSMEN. 
No one, however good a shot, has ever returned, after 
a campaign with the rifle against deer, or what you will, 
to the snipe-meadow, without finding that he requires some 
days’ practice before he can cut down the long bill so soon 
as he tops the rushes, with the precision and instinctive 
swiftness he had before he visited the prairie or the forest. 
For the person who desires, above all things, to be a 
first-rate performer with the shot gun on the wing, who is 
so, and who only cares about riile-shooting as a superfluous 
accomplishment, for which he expects to find little occa- 
sion and less exercise on its legitimate game in the field, 
I advise that the rifle be let alone in tote. So nearly do 
I hold the two accomplishments incompatible in their 
perfection. 
I do not mean that a first-rate flying shot may not 
shoot enough with the rifle not to be a complete bungler, not 
to miss a deer or a man standing at a hundred yards; but 
I do mean that if he be ambitious, and once get so far with 
his rifle, he will be apt to proceed, until he succeeds to 
the utmost, and then—good-bye! to his lightning-like dash 
and swiftness on the wing. 
The same is, more or less, the case, vice versa ; but as 
it is, I believe, quite impossible that a person, who hag 
become by years of patient practice a perfect and uner- 
ring rifle shot, without any early knowledge of the shot 
gun—as is the case with hundreds on hundreds of foresters 
and woodmen in the West and East—can ever, by any 
amount of practice, at a late day in life, become a crack 
shot on the wing, so will the attempted practice of it 
interfere the less with his old acquired habits. 
