musket from their hands while they were
endeavouring to reload. The wild beast has
sense enough to adopt the same tactics, and
it is therefore not surprising to read that the
Texan Indians (without knowing anything of
the Caffres) served their white enemies
precisely in the same way. American borderers,
not having the habit of looking to a Colonial
Office five thousand miles off for orders,
or instructions, or protection, were better
prepared to meet such antagonists than
the settlers of Sandy Rock. But even
in that agreeable border land—where no man
thinks of going abroad without his tools;
where Senator Wilson, commonly called Horse
Ears, quarrels with Senator Doubleup, and
fights out his quarrel, in the presence of Speaker
and reporters' gallery as an enlivening
episode in the debate; where a purely
indigenous bravo and outlaw, is sentimentally
described to be not necessarily in other
respects a disagreeable member of society,
but possibly an affectionate husband, a fond
parent, a pleasant neighbour, courteous,
humane, and seldom in liquor; where peaceful-
looking grey-headed personages, riding
into town with no implements visible, except
a double-barrel rifle, a bowie-knife, and
an Arkansas toothpick, are remarked by
loungers to be poorly armed, and not to stand
half a chance—the Indian on horseback,
with his antediluvian bow and arrow, is
deemed a formidable enemy. He does not
retire before the white man quite so
obediently to a law of nature as philosophers
believe. The prairie tribes of Texas ride
with boldness and wonderful skill. They are
so dexterous in discharging arrows from the
bow that a single Indian, galloping at full
speed, is capable of keeping an arrow
constantly in the air between himself and his
enemy. The American borderers have become
hardy, self-reliant, and superabundantly
warlike,from the necessity of maintaining their
footing against such undaunted and skilful
foes. Their Virginia bear-rifles and double-
barrel rifles were an improvement; but
the first had no advantage except its long
range and spinning bullet; and the latter,
although valuable for giving two chances
instead of one, was very heavy, difficult to
aim with and, when once discharged, took
exactly as long to reload as two muskets.
They were taught early that their great
countryman's preference for the oldest weapon
in the world over the latest improved firearms
of his days, was not so paradoxical as
it seemed. Perhaps they were too proud of
being civilised men to take to bows and arrows
again; but they must many a time have
envied the Indian his rapid and continuous
discharge, and dreamt of a gun that would
fire many balls without reloading.

Such weapons had been attempted long before,
in Europe, and abandoned as impracticable.
There are in the Armoury of the Tower of
London several guns of Indian make and of
very beautiful workmanship, which are known
to be as old as the fifteenth century. These
guns are in principle precisely the same as
the guns and pistols now known as revolvers,
or repeating fire-arms; but they have
serious defects. They are liable to ignite all
the charges at once, and seem to have
been abandoned for practical warfare as
dangerous or useless. No treatises spoke
of them, though there were similar specimens
of British and French manufacture
in the United Service Museum, and at the
Rotunda at Woolwich; at Warwick Castle,
and at the Musée d'Artillerie, and the
Hôtel Cluny in Paris. Even when Elisha
Collier, an American gunsmith, in the year
one thousand eight hundred and eighteen, hit
upon the same principle, he fell into the very
errors which earlier gunmakers had already
remedied. Another American gunsmith in
the following year patented a revolver, which
was also found to be impracticable.

Colonel Colt is undoubtedly the first
inventor of a really available repeating pistol.
Ignorant, as he declares himself to have
been of all previous attempts of the kind,
and having an imperfect knowledge of
mechanics, he had thought as early as the year
eighteen hundred and twenty-nine, of the
possibility of making a pistol that might be
fired many times without reloading. Living,
he says, in a country of most extensive frontier,
still inhabited by aborigines, and knowing
the insulated position of the enterprising
pioneer, and his dependence sometimes alone
on his personal ability to protect himself
and his family, he had often meditated upon
the inefficiency of the ordinary double-barrelled
gun and pistol; both involving a loss
of time in reloading, which was frequently
fatal in the peculiar character of Indian warfare.
When a youth, indeed, returning from
a voyage to India, he had amused himself
on board the vessel in constructing a model
of his idea in wood, burning out the bores with
hot iron. His first device was that bundle
of barrels well known in the windows of the
London gunsmiths, and which is merely a
multiplied double barrel. But, in eighteen
hundred and thirty-five—about the time when
Her Majesty's Board of Ordnance were
beginning to hear of percussion caps, invented
by a clergyman thirty years previously—Colonel
Colt patented in the United States a pistol
on the principle of a rotating cylinder breech,
and a single barrel—a far more simple and
beautiful invention.

For those who have not seen a genuine Colt's
Revolver, we will endeavour to describe some
of the advantages of this weapon. The revolving
cylinder, behind the fixed barrel, is drilled
with six holes, into which, one after the other,
the powder is rapidly dropped without being
measured; for it is impossible to put in too
much powder, if room enough be left for the
ball. Six balls are then taken in the hand, and
also placed, one after the other, in the holes.