But the pistol is discharged for a fowling-piece--brown and rusty, with a slight crack probably in the muzzle, and a lock out of all proportion to the barrel. Then the young shooter aspires at halfpennies thrown up into the air--and generally hit, for there is never wanting an apparent dent in copper metal; and thence he mounts to the glancing and skimming swallow, a household bird, and therefore to be held sacred, but shot at on the excuse of its being next to impossible to hit him--an opinion strengthened into belief by several summers' practice. But the small brown and white marten wheeling through below the bridge, or along the many-holed red sand-bank, is admitted by all boys to be fair game--and still more, the long-winged legless black devilet, that, if it falls to the ground, cannot rise again, and therefore screams wheeling round the corners and battlements of towers and castles, or far out even of cannon-shot, gambols in companies of hundreds, and regiments of a thousand, aloft in the evening ether, within the orbit of the eagle's flight. It seems to boyish eyes that the creatures near the earth, when but little blue sky is seen between the specks and the wallflowers growing on the coign of vantage: the signal is given to fire; but the devilets are too high in heaven to smell the sulphur. The starling whips with a shrill cry into his nest, and nothing falls to the ground but a tiny bit of mossy mortar, inhabited by a spider!
But the Day of Days arrives at last, when the schoolboy, or rather the college boy, returning to his rural vacation (for in Scotland college winters tread close, too close, on the heels of academies), has a gun--a gun in a case--a double-barrel too--of his own--and is provided with a licence, probably without any other qualification than that of hit or miss. On some portentous morning he effulges with the sun in velveteen jacket and breeches of the same--many-buttoned gaiters, and an unkerchiefed throat. 'Tis the fourteenth of September, and lo! a pointer at his heels--Ponto, of course--a game-bag like a beggar's wallet at his side--destined to be at eve as full of charity--and all the paraphernalia of an accomplished sportsman. Proud, were she to see the sight, would be the "mother that bore him;" the heart of that old sportsman, his daddy, would sing for joy! The chained mastiff in the yard yowls his admiration; the servant lasses uplift the pane of their garret, and, with suddenly withdrawn blushes, titter their delight in their rich paper curls and pure night-clothes. Rab Roger, who has been cleaning out the barn, comes forth to partake of the caulker; and away go the footsteps of the old poacher and his pupil through the autumnal rime, off to the uplands, where--for it is one of the earliest of harvests--there is scarcely a single acre of standing corn. The turnip-fields are bright green with hope and expectation--and coveys are couching on lazy beds beneath the potato-shaw. Every high hedge, ditch-guarded on either side, shelters its own brood--imagination hears the whirr shaking the dewdrops from the broom on the brae--and first one bird and then another, and then the remaining number, in itself no contemptible covey, seems to fancy's ear to spring single, or in clouds, from the coppice brushwood with here and there an intercepting standard tree.