me, with tenfold zeal and purpose, to the practice of bullet-shooting.
Not that I ever expected to shoot the Doone family, one by one, or even
desired to do so, for my nature is not revengeful; but that it seemed
to be somehow my business to understand the gun, as a thing I must be at
home with.

I could hit the barn-door now capitally well with the Spanish
match-lock, and even with John Fry's blunderbuss, at ten good land-yards
distance, without any rest for my fusil. And what was very wrong of me,
though I did not see it then, I kept John Fry there, to praise my shots,
from dinner-time often until the grey dusk, while he all the time should
have been at work spring-ploughing upon the farm. And for that matter so
should I have been, or at any rate driving the horses; but John was
by no means loath to be there, instead of holding the plough-tail. And
indeed, one of our old sayings is,--

"For pleasure's sake I would liefer wet,
Than ha' ten lumps of gold for each one of my sweat."

And again, which is not a bad proverb, though unthrifty and unlike a
Scotsman's,--

"God makes the wheat grow greener,
While farmer be at his dinner."

And no Devonshire man, or Somerset either (and I belong to both of
them), ever thinks of working harder than God likes to see him.

Nevertheless, I worked hard at the gun, and by the time that I had
sent all the church-roof gutters, so far as I honestly could cut them,