to speak.  When occupied of a mellow October afternoon by a party of the autochthones, in their pea-jackets of blue or hickory homespun, it presents a gay and cheery spectacle.  Festooning fence and tree around them, the Virginia creeper, or Ampelopsis, shames vermilion against the mass of pines that glooms skyward beyond.  Other tints of vegetable decay fringe the brook where it winds from side to side of the long strip of grass, green from the autumnal rain.  Little reck the assembled marksmen of Nature’s stage-decorations.  One group will be mentally weighing the turkeys, another discussing the distance—­too long or too short for the peculiar powers of this or the other individual or his weapon.  Around the rude target kneel two or three, scoring on it each man his “centre,” above or below, to the right or left, of the true centre, to counteract the ascertained obliquity of his eye or his gun.  Here a six-foot Stoic, the Nestor of the glen, is very formally going through the ceremony of loading.  Another is slowly, and with the precision of an astronomer, adjusting the tin slides which protect his barrel from the glitter of the sun.  The chatter of a bevy of country maidens ripples from over the way.  The horses whinny under their square-skirted saddles, or stand “hard by their chariots champing golden corn,” like the horses of Nestor, Agamemnon, Homer and Gladstone before Dr. Schliemann’s Troy; the yearlings in the meadow alternately gaze and graze; the guinea-fowl now and then honors the shout over a good shot with its harsh but well-meant rattle; the rifle speaks at measured intervals; the prizes thin off to the remainder gobbler; and so, with the quiet characteristic of rifle-matches, the evening draws toward the dew.  The smoke-whitened guns are carefully swabbed with tow and prepared for their rest as tenderly as infants.  Dobbin is rescued from the (fence) stake to hie hill-ward with his master, cantering exultant or jogging grumly according to the result of the “event;” and the metropolis of Petticoat Gap—­for such, in the vernacular and on the maps, is its unfortunate designation—­relapses into virtuous repose.

The implement employed at these rural reunions is rarely the breech-loader, or even the short gun.  It promises to hold its ground for years yet, gradually yielding to the little modern tool.  The essential characteristics of this we have described as they exist and will probably remain.  Variations in the rifling and—­where muzzle-loading is abandoned—­in the appliances of the chamber will continue to be made, as they have heretofore been made without number numberless.  The patterns now fashionable will give place to others, in their turn to be dropped like a last year’s coat.  Remington, Winchester and the rest will retire in favor of new contrivers, devoted, like them, to the simple task of facilitating the flight of the leaden arrow with its grooved feather in steel or iron.  With them will rise and fall