We were living at Dobbs Ferry, on the Hudson.

My gun was a breech-loading, pin-fire double-barrel, of French manufacture.
It was an excellent gun for a clumsy and often absent-minded boy.

There was no spring to open it, and if the mechanism became rusty it could be opened with a brick without serious damage.

When the cartridges stuck they could be removed in the same fashion.

If they were loaded, however, the result was not always happy, and I tattooed myself with partially unburned grains of powder more than once.
When I was fourteen years old, in the winter of '72 and '73, I visited Europe for the second time, and this trip formed a really useful part of my education.