The Double Time.
A METHOD OF INSTRUCTION FOR THE SPEEDY ACQUIREMENT OF PROFICIENCY IN THE USE OF THE LONG RANGE RIFLE.
The recruit or pupil must FIRST have his intelligence distinctly informed, and his memory strongly impressed, with what the Rifle can be made to do at any given distance. He will thus be prepared for instruction, SECONDLY, in the art of making it do what it can do.
The first particular may perhaps be accomplished to full satisfaction by the following method. The trials that now induce the proposal of it,[[17]] were, with the regulation musquet, very satisfactory. The various degrees of the power of the weapon were, to the extent the experiment was carried, accurately ascertained and distinctly exhibited.
A piece of level ground must be set apart for rifle practice. The length, with the present power of range, should be from 1400 to 1500 yards. Forty feet would be sufficient for the width, excepting at the permanent butt, where, for security’s sake, it should be at least forty yards. It would be very desirable that no boundary straight walls or fences should guide the eye to the target. At the permanent butt, a racket court wall should be built, from thirty to forty feet high, and from thirty to forty yards wide, with side-wings, to stop glancing shot.
Ten yards in front of this centre should stand a wooden target, painted white if the wall be painted black, or vice versâ; with a “bull’s-eye” at four and a half feet from the ground—this target being divided into square feet by lines, easily distinguishable through a small telescope from the furthest extremity of the range.
From this wooden target, as a commencement, the practice ground should be marked off into lengths of fifty yards each. At each of these fifty-yard stations, two sockets should be sunk into the ground, to hold, when required, the outer frame of an intermediate target.
The inner frame should hang by hinges on the outer, so as to open and shut as a door.
It should be covered with the most yielding material (paper or otherwise), that would stand with an ordinary wind, so as to offer the least possible resistance to a passing bullet.
It should be painted with a “bull’s-eye” and lines, corresponding precisely with those of the wooden target. The wooden target station should be provided with a ball-proof sentry-box for the marker, on wheels; and each of the intermediate stations with a like ball-proof sentry-box, a long wooden shed, with a locker in it for the paper target, and a very solid and steady rest on wheels, with a groove at the top for the steady firing from it of the rifle, at the same height from the ground as the “bull’s-eye” in the targets.