Fig. 47. Details of fine gunsmithing.
Fig. 48. This was what a gentleman carried in a holster at his saddle-bow in mid-seventeenth century Italy.
[Fig. 50] illustrates a very complete outfit of pistols and accessories made at Lisbon, Portugal, by Jacinto Xavier in 1799. There are a pair of double barreled holster pistols for rides abroad, and a pair of small but deadly pocket pistols for self defense or card table arguments. With these are the accessories and tools appropriate to them: powder flask, powder measure, bullet molds, oil can, hammer, screw driver, awl, (for cleaning the touch holes), and box for spare flints and bullets. All are enclosed in a handsome mahogany case.
The outfit is definitely that of a dandy, for every piece is beautifully made and exquisitely decorated. The steel parts of the pistols are brilliantly polished or deeply blued. The stocks are delicately inlaid with rococo scrolls of silver wire. The oil can is a dainty hexagonal urn. Even the hammer and screw driver deserve in their own right places in a museum display.
Fig. 49. Not a weapon, but a device to test the strength of gunpowder. Yet just as beautiful as though it were deadly.
Students of the history of arms will delight in the holster pistols, for these have each two barrels side by side, while a single flintlock fires each in turn. The powder pan which catches the sparks from the flint is divided into two parts: that on the right transmits the ignition directly to the right hand barrel; that on the left is covered by a slide operated by a thumb piece on the left side of the pistol. When this slide is pulled back, a second priming charge is exposed, so that the lock may be snapped again to fire the left hand barrel. Both barrels may be unscrewed by means of a wrench attached to the bullet mold; they are loaded from the breach with a slightly oversized bullet which will not move through the barrel until the pistols are fired.
