Then comes, perhaps, the city popgun, in shape like a very musket, such as soldiers bear--a Christmas present from parent--once a Colonel of volunteers--nor feeble to discharge the pea-bullet or barley-shot, formidable to face and eyes; nor yet unfelt, at six paces, by hinder end of play-mate, scornfully yet fearfully exposed. But the shooter soon tires of such ineffectual trigger--and his soul, as well as his hair, is set on fire by that extraordinary compound--Gunpowder. He begins with burning off his eyebrows on the King’s birth-day--squibs and crackers follow--and all the pleasures of the pluff. But he soon longs to let off a gun--“and follows to the field some warlike lord”--in hopes of being allowed to discharge one of the double-barrels, after Ponto has made his last point, and the half-hidden chimneys of home are again seen smoking among the trees. This is his first practice in fire-arms, and from that hour he is--a Shooter. Then there is in most rural parishes--and of rural parishes alone do we condescend to speak--a pistol, a horse one, with a bit of silver on the butt--perhaps one that originally served in the Scots Greys. It is bought, or borrowed, by the young shooter, who begins firing, first at barn doors, then at trees, and then at living things--a strange cur, who, from his lolling tongue, may be supposed to have the hydrophobia--a cat that has purred herself asleep on the sunny church-yard wall, or is watching mice at their hole-mouths among the graves--a water-rat in the mill-lead--or weasel that, running to his retreat in the wall, always turns round to look at you--a goose wandered from his common in disappointed love--or brown duck, easily mistaken by the unscrupulous for a wild one, in pond, remote from human dwelling, or on meadow by the river side, away from the clack of the muter mill. The corby crow, too, shouted out of his nest on some tree lower than usual, is a good flying mark to the more advanced class, or morning magpie, a-chatter at skreigh of day close to the cottage door among the chickens, or a flock of pigeons wheeling over head on the stubble-field, or sitting so thick together that every stook is blue with tempting plumage.