ong rows of them standing very
neatly in racks, their walnut stocks heel by heel, their grim, blue
muzzles in long, serried ranks, very orderly and precise; and
something in their very orderliness endowed them with a certain
individuality as it were. It almost seemed to me that they were
waiting, mustered and ready, for that hour of ferocious roar and
tumult when their voice should be the voice of swift and terrible
death. Now as I gazed upon them, filled with these scarcely definable
thoughts, I was startled by a sudden shattering crash near by, a
sound made up of many individual reports, and swinging about, I
espied a man seated upon a stool; a plump, middle-aged, family sort
of man, who sat upon his low stool, his aproned knees set wide, as
plump, middle-aged family men often do. As I watched, Paterfamilias
squinted along the sights of one of these guns and once again came
that shivering crash that is like nothing else I ever heard. Him I
approached and humbly ventured an awed question or so, whereon he
graciously beckoned me nearer, vacated his stool, and motioning me to
sit there, suggested I might try a shot at the target, a far disc
lighted by shaded electric bulbs.

"She's fixed dead on!" he said, "and she's true--you can't miss. A
quick pull for single shots and a steady pressure for a volley."

Hereupon I pressed the trigger, the gun stirred gently in its clamps,
the air throbbed, and a stream of ten bullets (the testing number)
plunged into the bull's-eye and all in the space of a moment.

"There ain't a un'oly 'un of 'em all could say 'Hoch the Kaiser' with
them in his stomach," said Paterfamilias thoughtfully, laying a hand
upon the respectable stomach beneath his apron, "it's a gun, that
is!" And a gun it most assuredly is.

I would have tarried longer with Paterfamilias, for in his own way,
he was as arresting as this terrible weapon--or nearly so--but the
Captain, gentle-voiced and serene as ever, suggested that my
companions had a train to catch, wherefore I reluctantly turned away.
But as I went, needs must I glance back at Paterfamilias, as
comfortable as ever where he sat, but with pudgy fingers on trigger
grimly at work again, and from him to the long, orderly rows of guns
mustered in their orderly ranks, awaiting their hour.

We walked through shops where belts and pulleys and wheels and cogs
flapped and whirled and ground in ceaseless concert, shops where
files rasped and hammers rang, shops