Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/528216
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 2 8 lady I had ever laid eyes on. She sat there cross-legged, her head down, casually reading a magazine. Her long dark hair fell in perfect waves around her lovely angular shoulders, and her whole carriage spoke of elegance, grace, and character. She was here to see me about . . . well, to be honest, I've forgotten exactly why she was there, and all I know for certain is that a couple of years later she and I were married and teamed up to make the finest daughter a man could ever wish for. That's the way it works sometimes. You're just going along doing your dailies, minding your own business, when something that turns out to be positively life-altering jumps up and bites you where these sorts of things often bite. And so it was with the little English 16 gauge. E leven years later that very same daughter and I walked into a local gun show. We hadn't even made our way into the main showroom when the most captivating shotgun I had ever beheld jumped off a table and into my hands. Before I knew it, she was nestled snuggly into my shoulder with her rich, warm walnut stock pressed seductively into my face. She was a slender little 16-gauge side-by-side with beautifully proportioned 28-inch barrels, straight-gripped with precisely the correct amount of drop and cast that made me 'n her a dead-on fit. Her balance was immaculate, her form a sensual delight. Her engraving was perfectly imperfect and tastefully executed, her wood God's own definitive expression of what finely figured walnut should be. And each time I lowered her to my chest and then raised her once more to my shoulder, she whispered sweet nothings in my ear. This went on for a rather awkward minute or two, until people walking past began to stop and stare and the guy at the table finally felt compelled to speak. "Like that gun, Mike?" And I looked down, and there sat my old pal Mo, grinning ear to ear like he already knew he had me. "Sorry, man. I guess I got carried away there. What the heck is this?" He told me what little he knew about the gun, how he'd picked it up from an old grouse-and- woodcock hunter in Michigan last November, that it was made by A. Hill & Son in England sometime in the early 1920s, and all the incidental stuff that I hadn't yet discovered for myself. I knew right then I could never live without her, and we've been life partners ever since. Oh, the attention that gun drew as we walked through the show. "What'cha got there buddy?" became the recurring question. "A. Hill and Son," became my recurring reply. "It's a Little English 16 gauge." "She for sale?" "Nope." And nearly as often . . . "Daddy, ya want me to carry that gun for you?" "Thanks little bud, but I got it." Then a few minutes later, "Want The engraving on the little side-by-side is elegantly imperfect, with a unique character all its own.