freshen my eye at the great snow mountains of
cloud,

Those mighty fragments rent away
From some white Alp of yesterday.

The larks are singing overhead. The blackbirds
answer them from the plantation on the hill.

St. Ives is now in a superb position: his
left arm on his chest and quite under the gun,
so that the barrel is embedded firm and steady
in the palm of his left hand; his right arm is
rectangular, and kept well out. The back and
foresight are in splendid line. The barrel does
not waver nor tremble a hair's breadth: it
might be a bar of steel riveted into a stone
wall. The keeper went under cover when I
threw up my felt just now. There is a dead
silence. St. Ives holds his breath and presses
the trigger gently, but firmly—a jerk or bend
forward from anxiety would ruin the aim.

Bang! A thin angry jet of fire, a puff of
backward-blown smoke, a ping! a whiz! then
a curious echo as of an axe coming down on a
wood-block; a slight ripping sound as of torn
canvas, and a spirt of dust in the butt
immediately behind the target.

"A centre, I'll bet a fiver, though I say it
that shouldn't say it!" says St. Ives, keeping
his gun for a moment in position.

The keeper emerges from his troglodyte cave
and lumbers to the target. He looks a moment,
then returns to his burrow.
"A miss!" said I.

"Not it," replied St. Ives, quietly ringing
down his ramrod. " I know all his moves. He's
only gone back to get his rule to measure if it
is a centre or a bull's-eye."

The keeper waves the blue flag— St. Ives's
was a centre.

Now, as this was one of my first days' rifle
practice, I may as well confess that the art is
not an easy one— cool head, iron nerves, strong
wrist, keen true eye, much thought and
observation, and all these things aided by
constant practice, are needed to make a good rifle
shot. The quick instinct and partnership of
eye and hand is all very well for a partridge
or rabbit shot, but here other qualities are
required. The distances are so long, that an error
of the smallest fraction of an inch in the aim,
throws the bullet up or down, many yards. At
first it seems almost impossible to keep a rifle
weighing eight pounds, steady, in a difficult
position; anxiety, moreover, is as detrimental
to good aim, as carelessness or even incompetence.
Then, the wind and any fault of one's
gun have both studiously to be provided for. It
is often necessary, too, purposely to aim a little
too low or too high, to allow for the involuntary
jerk up of the rifle-barrel in firing.

I have slipped the bar of the backsight to the
little figures 200. I make ready, I present. I
feel the little nib of the foresight coming up
over the horizon of the notch or gap in the
backsight, and both telling against the black
wafer. I try to get an aim dead in the centre,
but I feel the barrel waver. I wish I had
pulled on my first instinct. Slowly I readjust it.
I remember my breath—I press the trigger in
dead silence. Again the crack, rush, and billet-
hopping echo.

"High to the right," said St. Ives. " I saw
it hit. Half the bullets fired fell away to the
right. You can correct that, partly by making
a rest of the sling, and twisting your elbow
in it."

The keeper, without going to the target,
waved a white flag.

We fire six more bullets, all either whites or
blues, except one bull's-eye of St. Ives's, at two
hundred, and we then move backward to the
three hundred yards: a distance generally found
peculiarly diflicult by volunteers.

We move the bars of our rest up to the
required distance.

"Patch," roars St. Ives to the keeper. Out
he tumbles, paste-box in hand, and is soon busy
at work. Our gun-barrels now begin to get
besmirched about the breech, the nipples are
black, and moist at the tips; while at the
muzzles there are little spits and frothings of red,
the result of the fired grease from the cartridges.

The target now looks scarcely bigger than
the door of a hackney-coach; the black wafer,
too, contracts. St. Ives lies on his stomach,
like a deer-stalker, and fires; or he kneels on his
left heel and makes a firm rest of his left elbow
on his left knee. We look at each bullet as
it emerges, clean and bright, from its paper
chrysalis, with tender solicitude. St. Ives is
four above me, and the distance is increasing;
but I get steadier, and begin to feel an instinct
when I shall hit and how my aim is. We now
no longer hear the rip of the cloth, and have to
trust entirely to the keeper and his three flags.

As I lie on the grass, while the patching goes
on, among a litter of scraps of cartridges,
powder-horns, boxes of caps, turnscrews, rag,
bullets, and patches, I can hear, as the stun of
the shot leaves my ears, and almost before each
drifting puff of smoke has died away, the cheery
carols, clear, pure, and merry, of the blackbirds
chorusing from their golden bills within the
dark covert of the fir-trees on the hill. Every
now and then I see three or four rabbits come
peering out between the furze, and then amble
back to their holes.

At this moment St. Ives, who has been looking
about the grass in an observant way, suddenly
directs my attention to a large grassy
molehill some four feet in diameter, which one
of yesterday's Minié bullets has pierced with as
clean and exact a perforation as a punch makes
in a card. The bullet has pierced some two
feet of solid earth, and has left at going in and
going out, only a little spit of dust to mark its
terrible passage.

Back crawls the keeper, up flies my wide-
awake. In a moment Lacy's head peers over
the rampart, and as my gun-barrel becomes
horizontal it disappears with extreme rapidity.
This time I aim too low, and the ball spurns the
dust three feet from the left target-post.

"Too low, but a good bee-line," says St.
Ives, encouragingly. In beginning long