without; and if you cannot command success afterwards, you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you have taken the best course to ensure it. Every time you load, observe whether your touch-hole be free: it is but a moment’s occupation, and a certain security against a monstrous annoyance--missing fire, probably at one of your best chances during the day. In all cases of hanging or missing fire, the seat of disease is the touch-hole or chamber, if your cap has exploded: to these apply the remedy. I speak only with reference to detonators, as they have now become so very universal: of course when a flint gun is used, the mischief may be caused by a faulty flint. Your last act should be, when the day’s sport is over, before you enter the house, to let down the springs of your locks: the less stress you keep upon them, the more power and elasticity they will retain. This is the plan to make one lock wear out the best Damascus barrel. POWDER.--The names of most of the great manufacturers of gunpowder are now sufficient guarantee for the excellence of the article bearing their signatures. Purchase your supply from any respectable house, and you will be secure that it is genuine: beyond the label you need not seek. Your care, then, must be to preserve the original strength, by putting it into canisters closely corked and sealed, after first having carefully dried it,--a process for which Colonel Hawker gives this excellent recipe: “Your powder should always be properly _dried_, in order to do which make _two_ or _three_ plates very hot before the fire, and (first taking care to wipe them well, lest any particle of cinder should adhere to them) keep constantly shifting the powder from one to the other, without allowing it to remain sufficiently long in either to cool the plate. The powder will then be more effectually aired, and more expeditiously dried, than by the more common means of using only _one_ plate, which the powder, by lying on it, soon makes cold, and therefore the plate requires to be two or three times heated.” Nothing can be added to this, save the admonition that the operation be performed at such a distance from the fire as to prevent the possibility of a spark or cinder reaching you. The surest way is to dry your powder in one room, and to heat your plates in another.