THE WELSH DEE 



character. He declared they spoiled the river and 

 scared the trout, a superstition that experience would 

 hardly have endorsed. The waders by the way said 

 the same of the coracles. 



He was very different, for instance, from old Rhys 

 the Watcher, who had no prejudices at all so far as I 

 could ever find out, certainly none against coracles ; but 

 then he had no English to speak of. All flies with him 

 were the best on the river, and every stray angler was 

 ' a capital shentleman.' He was a dear old man, like an 

 ex-lifeguardsman run a bit to seed, thin and tall with 

 snowy whiskers. He carried the Celtic predilection, 

 and a very nice one it is, for saying what he thought 

 would be pleasant far beyond the bounds of reasonable 

 veracity. But this was not because he was a liar, but 

 because his English was so Hmited and his vocabulary 

 only contained words of a friendly and optimistic 

 description. He hadn't bothered to learn the others. 

 Whereas Evan Evans's larger range included many 

 ' damnatory ' clauses indispensable to his stout convic- 

 tions. When Rhys upon his daily round descended 

 to the river, he always remarked it was a good day for 

 fishing, of which he knew scarcely anything, even if 

 it were a north wind and low water. But what was 

 more serious, he would sometimes report great doings 

 by the rod below before you knew him thoroughly, 

 when your own basket was innocent of a single fish. 

 He was worst of all on flies, as he had a stock phrase, 

 * Yes, yes, capital, the best,' to the great undoing of 

 innocent, information-seeking strangers who had rigged 

 up a cast effective enough perhaps in the Hebrides but 

 perfectly useless on the Dee, He was so courteous, 



59 



