Sometimes The Hammers Are Filed, Little Notches Crossing,
And There Imagination Stops.
The workman can get no farther than his
file will go, and you know how that acts to and
Fro in a straight groove.
A pheasant or hare at full speed, a few trees - firs as most
characteristic - could be put on the plate, and something else on the
trigger guard; firs are easily drawn, and make most appearance for a few
touches; pheasants roost in them. Even a coat of arms, if it were the
genuine coat-of-arms of the owner's family, would look well. Men have
their book-plates and stamp their library volumes, why not a gun design?
As many sportsmen scarcely see their guns for three-fourths of the year,
it is possible to understand that the gun becomes a killing machine
merely to them, to be snatched up and thrown aside the instant its office
is over. But the gamekeeper carries his gun the year through, and sits in
the room with it when indoors, still he never even so much as scratches
an outline of his favourite dog on it. In these landscape days we put our
pictures on the walls only, and no imagination into the things we handle
and use. A good deal of etching might be done on a gun, most of it being
metal, while more metal could be easily inlaid for the purpose. Etching,
I suppose, is the right word; at all events, designs, records of actual
sporting feats, or outlines of favourite sporting places - nooks in the
woods, falls of the stream, deep combes of the hills - could be cut in
with aquafortis.
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