Many guns of inferior workmanship throw shot as strongly as those turned out by the best makers--although this is not the fact in general--but greater weight has to be given to insure tolerable safety, and the locks, if not the barrels, are sure to give out in a few years; whereas the high-priced article will be as perfect at the end of a dozen years--which have accustomed its owner to its easy, rapid, and effective management--as it was in the beginning, and will endure until failing sight, wasting disease, or accumulating years, shall compel its transfer into younger hands. Unless a man has continual practice, or is an excellent shot, it is a serious undertaking to change his gun and accustom himself to another, which, although apparently identical in weight and shape, will inevitably differ in some slight point that will be sufficient to destroy, for a time, accuracy in aim and prompt execution in cover. Some persons require months to acquire the effective use of a new gun under difficult circumstances; and in those dense thickets where so much of our shooting is done, and where it is by instinct founded upon long habit that the sportsman is enabled at all to kill his game, and where he cannot indulge in the deliberate care that more open shooting allows--this deficiency will be most painfully apparent. For such persons to purchase a new piece, is equivalent to throwing away the sport of an entire summer or fall, and when we consider that few of us can expect to average more than forty summers or falls, the loss of one-fortieth part of life’s enjoyment is no trivial deprivation. A very cheap gun is dangerous; but it is not expected that any person reading these lines will trust his life with an instrument that common sense tells him is manufactured to kill at both ends. A gun of moderate price, that is, about one hundred dollars, is as safe as the most expensive--the iron is not so tough, but more of it is used; but in a short time the barrels will wear away; the locks, losing their original quick spring and sharp click, will become dull and weak, till they will scarcely discharge the cap; and the stock, warping with the weather, will exhibit yawning fissures between itself and the iron lock-plates or false breech. In lightness, however, is the great superiority of the highly wrought implement; and in hard tramping through a dense swamp of a hot July day, or deep wading in a soft snipe-meadow, or in a wearisome trudge over hill and dale after November quail, a pound will make itself felt in the additional weight of the fowling-piece, and not only so, but a light gun can be handled more readily. In open shooting, especially for the wild fowl of our bays and coasts, mere weight is a positive advantage; but in the tangled thickets, where birds flash out of sight like gleams of party-colored light, and the instantaneous use of the piece can alone secure success, a light gun is an absolute necessity.