ON ANGLING. 95 



ambition will surely have incited you to make trial of a longer 

 line than this, and by gradually increasing the length, with 

 your growing skill, you will soon be able to command quite 

 as much water as is generally necessary to angling success. 

 To be able to throw a long line is good, but to be able to throw 

 a light and accurate line is better. Divest your mind of 

 the idea, which really does seem as if it were the obsession 

 of many an angler, that the fish are sitting in the water 

 considering the pleasant spectacle of yourself wielding the 

 rod and that they will confess themselves captive in pro- 

 portion to the grace with which you acquit yourself. The 

 trout are really not busying themselves about the question 

 whether it is your thumb or your forefinger that you will place 

 along the rod. All their concern is with the objects which 

 are passing over their heads in the water. If such an object 

 be like one of the succulent insects in which they delight they 

 are apt to suck it in. That is the obvious case from the trout's 

 point of view, a truth so obvious that it certainly would not 

 be worth insisting on were it not that so very many anglers 

 act as if it were a dark and hidden mystery to them, by reason 

 of their inveterate habit of considering the whole matter 

 entirely from their own and not at all from the trout's view- 

 point. Take, therefore, to heart the counsel that is implied 

 in a witty maxim from a witty book and " Do not throw with 

 a long line when a short one will answer your purpose." The 

 shortest cast that puts the fly over the trout's nose is more 

 to that purpose than is the most skilful and longest which 

 places it far the other side of him. At the same time I may 

 tell you this, for your warning, that you need not lay the 

 flattering unction to your soul of supposing, after you have 

 acquired some facility in throwing a twelve or fifteen yard 

 line, that every reduction from that length makes the cast 

 more easy. Very much the contrary of that, the hardest, 

 perhaps, of all throws to make, apart from the casts which 

 have their own special vexations in the form of bushes and 

 adverse winds, is the throw which shall place the fly nicely 

 and lightly over the head of a trout rising quite close to you. 

 In such a case, you see, you get none of the help of that so 

 grossly called " belly of the line," with its weight, to take 

 out the light cast in which all terminates. You have, as 



