THE WELSH DEE 



Divine mystic attributes have vaguely clung to its 

 clear restless waters since time began for bards and 

 seers, and it has pleased them all from Taliesin to 

 Tennyson to fancy that its streams whisper the for- 

 gotten secrets of ancient days. The dry-fly purist, I 

 know, feels none of these things. Nay, he seems 

 almost to resent their association with fishing. He 

 does not understand what they have to do with it, 

 and so there is nothing more to be said. But there 

 are no dry-fly purists upon the Dee. It is pre- 

 eminently a wet-fly river. For myself I admit without 

 shame that the romantic scenery of the upper, or 

 Welsh, half of the Dee, and more especially that which 

 I have chiefly frequented, added to the wealth of story 

 that gathers about its banks, has been to me an in- 

 finite addition to the more material but engrossing 

 pursuit of its fish. 



Now, in the very heart of North Wales, fringed 

 with the gracious verdure of farms, hamlets, and 

 country houses, but in the lap of overhanging grouse 

 moors, Llyn Tegid, or as we usually call it from the 

 little town at its lower end, Bala lake, spreads its five- 

 mile length. The Dee comes brawling out of it a full- 

 fledged lusty river, having entered it but a trifling 

 brook. It is sometimes said, probably by those who 

 have had but a passing glance from the train windows, 

 that Bala lake is of no great scenic account. I don't 

 know how that may be. But from its unruffled bosom 

 on a still summer evening, I have seen the peaks of 

 Arran, which pile up some three thousand feet behind 

 its western end, reflecting their shapely masses in its 

 glassy surface as in a mirror. This I think is sufficient, 



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