ying success to the experimenters, at
Solferino and Sadowa, gave a new impetus to the rifle movement in
England, as France, a trifle later, did to the Battle-of-Dorking
school of prophetic literature. Thus it happens that the rifle is
taking its place gradually by the side of fat Durhams, gooseberries,
lop eared rabbits and the Derby as a popular sensation. Johnny sends
over a "team," evidently in his judgment a whole one, to "shoot the
American continent." His next deputation ought to be sent, after
vanquishing the "blarsted" Gothamites, to the recesses of the
Alleghany, and pitted there against the woodsman with his ancient
weapon carrying a round ball of seventy-five to the pound, five
feet long and decorated with tin sights, double trigger and mayhap
flint-lock. The adventurers would beat in the long run, but they would
go home not wholly unlearned. Should they stay to a turkey-shoot,
they would see in it the Occidental analogue of their own public
matches--more picturesque, if not quite so prim and scientific.
Strictly, it presupposes conditions non-existent in England--a
community, for instance, first of hunters, and second of hunters with
the rifle.

This recreation, primarily belonging to localities where large game,
such as deer and wild-turkeys, is found, has spread down to the
cities, where it breaks out in a sporadic form about Christmas. But
the hills are its home--the foot-hills, notably, of the Appalachian
range, the domestic turkey not being very common higher up, nor its
wild original ("original," we insist, _pace_ the _Agricultural Report_
ornithologist, who finds an ineffaceable distinction in the fact that
the tail-ring of the one is sometimes, and that of the other never,
white!) lower down.

We mind us of an ancient town in the Valley of Virginia, settled
nearly a century and a half ago by riflemen, sheltered by them through
a stormy infancy, and still steeped in the traditions of the implement
in question. Spitted by the railway, the hub of many turnpikes, and
surrounded by a thickly-peopled country, it is yet near enough to the
mountains to receive from them each winter quite a delegation of their
inhabitants. Last year wild-turkeys were shot within the corporate
limits, a deer was chased within half a mile of them, and a fine
specimen of _Felis Canadensis_ was killed in an orchard still nearer.

Four miles west of the town the fertile limestone _carse_ swells into
the shady hills, clad large