possible range, the greatest possible number of shots in a given time, were demanded in a war wherein the opposing armies were seldom within five miles of each other, or more than one man hurt to five hundred charges of powder burned.  How the Lenni Lenape must have opened their eyes at this reproduction of the drama of a century ago when the whites, English and French, were fighting each other for the possession of the Delawares’ lands in Pennsylvania!  The feeble remnant of the compatriots of Logan had “moved on,” under pressure of a very urgent police, a thousand miles westward to a reservation not a great deal larger, when portioned out, than that last reservation allotted to all men; and the pale-faces who had hung upon his track he now saw fighting for that.

From its warlike aspect it is pleasant to turn to the contributions of the rifle to peaceful amusement, if not peaceful industry.  Contemptuously giving the go-by to its minutest phase in this field—­the “parlor rifle,” with a target against the chimney-piece or meandering, in feline form, along our neighbor’s roof-tree—­we go forth, with Snider and sunrise, to the forest fastness.  Our companions throng, tall, bronzed, close-knit and sinewy, true children of the four-grooved, from frosty Caucasus, the Hartz, the Alps, the Dovrafjeld, the Grampians, the Himmalaya, the Adirondack, the Alleghany, the Nevada.  The chamois, the ibex, the red deer, the Virginia deer, the wapiti, the gour, or the royal tiger may be the game in hand.  The tiger we are accustomed to associate exclusively with the dank jungles of Lower India, but he climbs, each summer, the great passes of Central Asia, “the roof of the world,” and makes his way to the frontier of Siberia, beyond 50 deg. north.

The equipment of the mountain-rifleman is characterized by simplicity and a strict attention to business.  The nature of the ground over which he works inexorably prescribes this.  The superfluities of the fox-hunter or the partridge-shooter with his dog-cart cannot be his.  Hatchet, pouch, knife and knapsack, with alpenstock on occasion, about comprise his kit.  He may be attended by a hound or two, but not a pack.  He wants no yelling.  He hears but

              the Spirit of the Mist,
  And it speaks to the Spirit of the Fell.

For little hollows and little hills Scott’s dogs, that

raved through the hollow pass amain,
Chiding the rocks that yelled again,

may have been highly effective when his mediaeval sportsmen, who carried no guns, could keep within a furlong of them.  But in the depths of the great mountains, with point-blank range of six hundred yards and long pops of nearly twice that, they would be preposterous.  Fancy the Quorndon or the Pytchley on the flanks of the Matterhorn!