Richard S. Lawrence, whose portrait appears in Fig. 40, was born in Chester, Vt., in 1817. When two years old, his father moved to Jefferson County, N. Y., and his boyhood was spent in the neighborhood of Watertown. He was only nine years old when his father died, and consequently he had a hard boyhood, with very little schooling, and was early at work in the support of the family. He worked on a farm and later in a woodworking shop, making carpenter’s and joiner’s tools. In the basement of this place was a custom gun shop, where he spent much of his spare time and became an expert gun maker. He worked with indifferent success at various jobs until the winter of 1837-1838, when he served in the United States army for three months, guarding the frontier during the Canadian Rebellion. At his discharge he determined to start in elsewhere for himself and thought of his relatives in Vermont. After a long journey by the Erie Canal, the newly built Albany & Schenectady Railroad, and by stage, he reached Windsor in 1838. A week or two after his arrival, while visiting a Doctor Story, he undertook to repair an old rifle, a “Turkey rifle,” made by the doctor’s brother in a gun shop in the neighborhood, and put on a peep-sight, a thing never heard of before in that neighborhood. He took the gun apart, leaded out the barrel, forged and finished the sight and put it on the gun. His skill in handling tools astonished those who watched him. Two days later, when the work was done, the doctor and Lawrence went out to try the gun. They paced off twelve rods from a maple tree which had a three-quarter-inch auger hole in it that had been used for a sap spout. Lawrence did the shooting. His own account of it is as follows: “The doctor tended target. Could find no ball hole. Said I missed the tree. I fired again, no ball hole to be found. Doctor came up to me and said I had spoiled his rifle. Before my repairs he could kill a chicken every time at twelve rods. I said, ‘Uncle, I am very sorry, but I will make the gun all right before I leave it.’ He said he could not consent to my doing anything more to improve the shooting qualities--the sight he liked very much. I said that as the gun was loaded I would take one more shot and see if I could not hit the tree. After the third shot I went up to the tree to investigate, and all of the three balls which I had fired were found in the auger hole.”[185] The doctor was astonished, for he had never heard of such shooting. [185] Quoted from the full account given in Appendix A.