"
"I should like to know what the deuce you mean by slovenly and
unsportsmanlike," said Frank, pulling out of his breast pocket a couple
of bullets, carefully sewed up in leather--"it is the best plan
possible, and saves lots of time--you see I can just shove my balls in
at once, without any bother of fitting patches."
"Yes," replied Harry, "and five to one the seam, which, however neatly
it is drawn, must leave a slight ridge, will cross the direction of the
grooving, and give the ball a counter movement; either destroying
altogether the rotatory motion communicated by the rifling, or causing
it to take a direction quite out of the true line; accordingly as the
counteraction is conveyed near the breech, or near the muzzle of the
piece."
"Will so trifling a cause produce so powerful an effect?" inquired the
Commodore.
"The least variation, whether of concavity or convexity in the bullet,
will do so unquestionably--and I cannot see why the same thing in a
covering superinduced to the ball should not have the same effect. Even
a hole in a pellet of shot, will cause it to leave the charge, and fly
off at a tangent. I was once shooting in the fens of the Isle of Ely,
and fired at a mallard sixty or sixty-five yards off, with double B
shot, when to my great amazement a workman--digging peat at about the
same distance from me with the bird, but at least ninety yards to the
right of the mallard--roared out lustily that I had killed him.
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