With any other beginner I would have taken the pistol with me when I went up to the target.
Smoking is one of the greatest enemies to good shooting, even more so than alcohol.
A drinking man may, for a time, shoot well, till his nerves are destroyed, but smoking, long before it kills, makes a man unable to shoot well. He has too much twitch in his muscles.
It is curious how heavy smokers deceive themselves, and think it does them no harm.
At a dinner, a man told me that smoking could not possibly interfere with a man’s shooting.
He said: “I can lift a tumbler full of water without spilling a drop.”
There were plenty of tumblers and a decanter before him, but he took very good care not to demonstrate his contention.
I looked for his hands; he had one carefully out of sight, behind him; the other, with the eternal cigarette between the fingers, he was pressing tightly to his waistcoat, but not tightly enough to prevent my seeing that his hand was trembling as if with the palsy.
Then, he added, to clinch his argument:
It is all nonsense to pretend that smokers cannot stop smoking if they want to; I stopped for a whole week and the only thing was that I did not sleep and had no appetite; it was not worth it, so I began smoking again.