A Parker CHE 28-bore, Meriden, circa 1915–16:

An Imagined Journey

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One can imagine the gun where it was meant to be: in cover, late in the season, on the kind of cold bright morning that makes a man glad of a light gun. Frost still silvers the broomsedge in the low places the sun has not yet reached. A setter quarters the ground ahead, swinging into the wind, and the man behind it carries the little Parker the way one carries a gun he trusts — broken over the forearm, barely felt, five and a half pounds asking nothing of the arm that holds it.

The dog draws on, slows, and locks. The man closes the gun and steps past the setter’s nose, and the covey goes up in a hard grey rush. The 28 is at his shoulder before he has told it to — a gun this light and this short is already moving when a heavier gun is still being lifted — and two reports come close together over the dog’s head. The little gun has done what it was built to do, and done it faster than its size has any right to allow. He breaks it, and the cases clear; the morning smells of burnt powder and frost.

Such a gun does not happen by accident. Someone wanted it — wanted smallness without any loss of quality, the hardest thing a maker can be asked for — and went to the best sporting house in New York to have Meriden build it: short in the barrel, light in the hand, finished to the full, and cased in leather and red baize. A little gun, made on purpose, for exactly the morning above.

A century of seasons later it is still light in the hand, still quick to the shoulder, still carrying its colour. This is the story of why a man would choose such a thing, and of the house that could make the choice possible.

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Take the gun up and the first fact is scale. Everything about it is small and nothing about it is slight. The action is jewel-like — a trim little body beneath the standing breech, no broader than it must be — and the eye reads the weight before the scale confirms it at five pounds eight ounces. The barrels are twenty-four inches, deep blue-black and even, the kind of finish that lies down in the steel rather than sitting on top of it. They rise from a silver-grey action across whose surfaces the original case colour still moves in soft traces: grey, blue, a smoky green, a straw note at the edges. The fences are fully sculpted and engraved, the breech ends crisp, the rib neat and restrained.