"The child is father of the man, And I would wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety!"
So much for the Angler. The Shooter, again, he begins with his pipe-gun, formed of the last year's growth of a branch of the plane-tree--the beautiful dark-green-leaved and fragrant-flowered plane-tree--that stands straight in stem and round in head, visible and audible too from afar the bee-resounding umbrage, alike on stormy sea-coast and in sheltered inland vale, still loving the roof of the fisherman's or peasant's cottage.
Then comes, perhaps, the city pop-gun, 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 playmate, 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 birthday; 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 firearms, 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 churchyard 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 overhead on the stubble-field, or sitting so thick together that every stock is blue with tempting plumage.