my pocket, therefore, and disclose the real cause of this
diffidence.

In the year one thousand eight hundred and fourteen, I
embarked at Halifax on board the Buffalo store-ship for
England. She was a noble teak built ship of twelve or
thirteen hundred tons burden, had excellent accommodation,
and carried over to merry old England, a very merry party
of passengers, _quorum parva pars fui_, a youngster just
emerged from college.

On the banks of Newfoundland we were becalmed, and the
passengers amused themselves by throwing overboard a
bottle, and shooting at it with ball. The guns used for
this occasion, were the King's muskets, taken from the
arm-chest on the quarter-deck. The shooting was execrable.
It was hard to say which were worse marksmen, the officers
of the ship, or the passengers. Not a bottle was hit:
many reasons were offered for this failure, but the two
principal ones were, that the muskets were bad, and that
it required great skill to overcome the difficulty
occasioned by both, the vessel and the bottle being in
motion at the same time, and that motion dissimilar.

I lost my patience. I had never practised shooting with
ball; I had frightened a few snipe, and wounded a few
partridges, but that was the extent of my experience. I
knew, however, that I could not by any possibility shoot
worse than every body else had done, and might by accident
shoot better.