SOME WILTSHIRE MEMORIES 



had it been a permissible or popular bait in the upper 

 waters, would have accounted for some surprising fish. 

 The little river Og, which runs into the Kennet just 

 below Marlborough and, three or four miles up, shrivels 

 to a winter bourne, dry as a board in summer-time, 

 while its lower streams are stiff with weed, the old 

 keeper used to declare held even larger fish than the 

 Kennet. 



I never fished a Wiltshire stream again after that 

 day with a wet fly, though my days upon them, it 

 should be said, have been only occasional ones. This 

 was not from any particular enthusiasm or predilection 

 for the dry fly as a cult, for the rough water streams 

 and everything connected with them bind me to them 

 with an infinitely stronger tie. You can fish parts of 

 these last, to be sure, if you like, with a dry fly ; but 

 there is no great excess of art and no special difficulty 

 in this case, and usually you would not kill so many 

 fish as with two wet flies requiring quite as much skill 

 of a rather different kind. But in the comparatively 

 still and more monotonous surface of the chalk stream 

 it is quite different. For myself, I surrendered in a 

 single day. It seemed obvious that for waters like 

 this the new style — though I believe on the Test it had 

 been going some time — ^was the right thing. There 

 really zvas something of the ' chuck and chance it ' 

 reproach attached to the old wet-fly fishing of these 

 chalk streams. The phrase, it would be charitable 

 to think, was coined by persons who knew no others, 

 and then echoed by a thousand fools who knew very 

 little of any rivers, wet or dry, and applied it in- 

 discriminately. Nor had there been, I am sure, any- 



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