The most rapid way is to use five traps, in single-bird shooting, and employ five boys--with a relay of five others when the first are exhausted--to set them; boys are naturally more active than men, and are buoyed up by an excitement that the latter do not feel. The five birds are shot at before the traps are refilled; and by the time the last bird is released the boys stand armed with a fresh one apiece, ready to reset the traps in a moment. In this mode, with good luck in not having too many birds that have to be retrieved, and with regularity, fifteen hundred birds may be shot at in ten hours. The difficulty of obtaining pigeons in our seaboard cities has been so great of late years, as advancing civilization has reduced the number, and driven westward the migratory hosts which once visited the Eastern States, that not only has the expense enormously increased, but the practice of trap-shooting has diminished. The ordinary price along the Atlantic coast is from twenty to thirty dollars a hundred, and the supply is so small, that the collection of any considerable number, even at that rate, is extremely difficult. As skill in the act of shooting birds released from a trap, where the sportsman stands prepared, gun in hand and nerves disturbed, if at all, only by the presence of spectators, does not imply ability to acquit oneself well in the field, and tends but little to that end; so it is pursued not for improvement so much as for temporary excitement during the dull months of the year. Pigeons nest in June, a season during which there is absolutely no legitimate sport with the gun whatever; the woodcock are not yet grown, the snipe have passed to their northern homes, and the sportsman fills the vacancy with the emulation of surpassing his associates at trap-shooting. The attempt is exciting, and the art peculiar, requiring great self-command and utter disregard of the jeers, praises, or contemptuous laughter of a thousand spectators.