Page:The American Boy's Handy Book edition 1.djvu/235

must be very small, and a pin with its head filed off makes a simple point; some raw cotton bound on the butt end to make it fit the inside of the gun finishes the missile (Fig. 131, D). The tack is prepared by fastening short pieces of worsted or carpet ravellings to it just below the head with shoemakers' or beeswax (C, Fig. 131).

This not only fills up the space inside the blow-gun, making it fit, but the yarn also acts as a feather does upon an arrow and causes the tack to fly straight and point foremost. The worsted-headed tack is a "tip-top" missile for target practice. The clay pellet will bring down small birds, stunning them, but doing them no serious injury, so that if the birds are quickly picked up they can be captured alive.

Along the Mississippi River, from New Orleans to Nashville, there are still some remnants of the Indians that in olden times paddled their canoes up and down the Father of Waters. The boys among these tribes make splendid blow-guns out of cane. When the inside is bored out they straighten the cane by heating it over hot coals, and then, after attaching a heavy weight to one end, suspending it by a string attached to the other end. The heat from the hot coals makes the cane pliable, and before it becomes cold and hard, the weights make it almost as straight and true as a rifle-barrel.

Some time during the summer of each year a boy used to appear with a squirt-gun made of a piece of cane. Squirt-gun-time then commenced, next day four or five guns might be seen on the play-grounds, and before a week had passed the curbstone in front of the little frame school-house presented a line of boys all busily engaged in seeing who could shoot the greatest distance; the dusty macadamized street registered every drop of water by a muddy spot. I found that by adding