The _Dead Shot_ is an English book; and in England there are no rail or bay-snipe; the author, therefore, has never whistled a flock of marble-winged willet or golden-brown marlin back, time after time, to the fatal stand, and delivered repeated discharges into their thinning ranks. But ducks abound there; and for any person who has been present at the early morning or late evening flight, and has seen and heard the rush of wings innumerable, when a dozen guns and men to load them would hardly have been enough, to say that “rapidity of firing is seldom desirable,” is marvellous indeed. The italicized portion of the last objection further implies that _Dead Shot_ has never used a breech-loader; for, while in the muzzle-loader the heat of repeated discharges may be dangerous, in a breech-loader it cannot, as paper intervenes between the barrel and the powder. The writer has fired his breech-loader until it was so hot he could not bear his hand on it. This is the last of _Dead Shot’s_ objections, and none of them merit the attention they have received, except from the fact that this book has been extensively circulated in our country, where the merits of breech-loaders are little known. The objections so manifestly arise from prejudice or ignorance, that they need no contradiction to any one acquainted with the true state of the case, and are worthy of an author who, in his opening, says: “He only can be called a ‘Dead Shot’ who can bring down with unerring precision an October or November partridge, whenever it offers a fair chance, _i. e._ rises within certain range;” which range he afterwards, at page 86, puts at forty yards, in the following words: “With judicious loading and a regard to the principles of deadly range, a partridge may be killed with certainty at forty yards.” The partridge resembles, in many points, our quail, and sportsmen can tell whether quail can be killed “with certainty at forty yards,” or whether the best shot alive can kill them every time at any distance. In discussing the merits of any new invention, prejudice is one of the strongest grounds of opposition to overcome; and prejudice in favor of a weapon that we have tried and found trustworthy, that years of service have enabled us to use skilfully and have endeared to our affections, that has never, under all diversities of trial, failed to merit our confidence, is not merely a natural but praiseworthy feeling in the human mind. Prejudice, when at last driven to a corner and forced to give up as untenable the objection to the safety or shooting qualities of the breech-loader, will say: “I can shoot fast enough with a muzzle-loader.”