nsequent unreliability of the few native fowling-pieces which do
exist.

Well away from beaten tracks I have occasionally met local sports
carrying guns together with slow-matches of smouldering brown paper.
They are remarkable weapons, with single iron barrels some four feet
and a half long, about twenty bore and without stocks, but having
pistol handles. There are no locks or springs, the hammer and trigger
being in one piece, working through the handle on a rivet. The hammers
have slits in them as if to hold flints, but which really are intended
for the slow-match. Sometimes these men had good bags of snipe, but
only once have I seen such a gun fired, which was at a pigeon sitting
about fifteen yards high in a tree. The gunner blew his slow-match
into a glow and pressed it into the slit in the hammer, placed the
pistol handle to his hip and pulled the trigger, which brought the
hammer slowly forward until the slow-match rested on the powder in the
pan, when the gun went off and the pigeon fell dead. Whether birds
are shot on the wing with these guns I cannot say, but remembering
that a hundred and fifty years ago it was accounted an extraordinary
thing to attempt flying shots even in this country, I should think
probably not.

Old muzzle-loading rifles of European make, striking either flints or
percussion caps, are also in occasional use as shot-guns, in
preference to native weapons.

The shot are always of iron, which is far cheaper than lead, and
extremely liable to cause great injury to the teeth, while the powder
is very poor, burning slowly with much smoke and smell. No cut wads
are used, but pieces of paper, rammed home with a rod, which instead
of being carried attached to the gun is held in the hand together with
the slow-match.

These same sports catch snipe in long, light nets which they carry
stretched out horizontally some two feet above the grass, so that a
bird on rising as it passes overhead, flies into it and is at once
secured. Snares of wire and string, ingenious traps of bamboo which
impale the birds on wooden spikes, and wicker traps closely resembling
the straw plaiting on bottles of olive oil, I have seen set for snipe
and quail in various places.

I once travelled from Shanghai to Nanking with an aged French Jesuit
priest and a Chinese official then returning from the Black Dragon or
Amour river. The former told me that, shortly after the Taiping
rebellion, pheasants were so numerous an