The United States army pistol is a Browning invention.

    A Browning pistol manufactured by the Fabrique Nationale of Belgium
    was made the standard equipment for the armies of Belgium, Russia,
    Spain, Italy and Serbia.

    On completion of the one-millionth pistol by the Fabrique Nationale,
    King Albert of Belgium knighted the modest inventor, so he is now,
    officially, “Sir” John Browning.

    Browning is tall, slender, slightly stooped, 62, bald except for a
    rim of gray hair, and wears a closely clipped gray moustache.  His
    face is marked by a network of fine lines.

    Although Browning will not talk of himself or of his career as an
    inventor, he can’t help talking when the conversation is turned on
    guns.

“I always think of a gun as something that is made primarily to shoot,” he says.  “The best gun is the simplest gun.  When you begin loading a gun up with a lot of fancy contraptions and ’safety devices,’ you are only inviting trouble.  You complicate the mechanism and make that many more places for dirt and grit to clog the action.

    “You can make a gun so ‘safe’ that it won’t shoot.”

Of Browning’s new guns it is not, of course, permissible to give any details.  One, however, is a light rapid-fire gun, weighing only 15 pounds, which can be fired from the shoulder like the ordinary rifle.  Each magazine carries 20 rounds and the empty magazine can be detached and another substituted by pressing a button.

The heavier gun is a belt-fed machine, capable of firing 600 shots a minute.  Although it is water-cooled, it weighs, water jacket and all, only 28 pounds.  For airplane work, where the firing is in bursts and the speed of the machine helps cool the gun, the jacket is discarded and the gun weighs only 20 pounds.

    Both guns are counted upon as valuable additions to the equipment of
    our overseas forces.

THE NARRATIVE IN THE THIRD PERSON.  Although the interview, the personal experience article, and the confession story are largely narrative, they are always told in the first person, whereas the term “narrative article” as used in this classification is applied only to a narrative in the third person.  In this respect it is more like the short story.  As in the short story so in the narrative article, description of persons, places, and objects involved serves to heighten the effect.

Narrative methods may be employed to present any group of facts that can be arranged in chronological order.  A process, for example, may be explained by showing a man or a number of men engaged in the work involved, and by giving each step in the process as though it were an incident in a story.  The story of an invention or a discovery may be told from the inception of the idea to its realization.  A political situation may be explained by relating the events that led up to it.  The workings of some institution, such as an employment office or a juvenile court, may be made clear by telling just what takes place in it on a typical occasion.  Historical and biographical material can best be presented in narrative form.