THE DEVONSHIRE AVON 



achievement in successive weight that neither before 

 nor since have I ever accomplished in the sacred Dee. 

 And then I broke the middle joint of my rod short off, 

 tugging too fiercely at a rambling briar in which my 

 fly had fastened, and had nothing for it but to go 

 home ! There was another hundred or more yards of 

 that hedge-foot yet to be fished, and I have no doubt 

 another seven or eight fish of the same class waiting 

 to be caught. Two or three habitual anglers, who 

 knew every pebble in the river, came in that evening 

 with sore hearts and empty baskets, marvelling how 

 even Dee trout, queer as they are, could have main- 

 tained such an uncompromising sulk throughout the 

 whole of such a perfect fishing day. But for a mere 

 accident I, too, should of course have been numbered 

 among the unfortunates ; for no angler would ever 

 have dreamed of considering for a moment such an 

 impossible place for the choicer trout of a big river 

 running down in beautiful fly order, to be lying and 

 feeding in. For myself, I never had the opportunity 

 of finding the water just sprawling over the gravel 

 to the edge of that bank again. And I doubt if any 

 one since has had the good luck to be fortuitously 

 attracted to it as I was under the same conditions. 

 It was cruel, however, to be thus checked in mid 

 career ; for one breaks a middle joint once, perhaps, 

 in five years, and then probably by sitting down upon 

 it in a moment of aberration ! 



To retrace our straying footsteps to the banks of 

 the Avon, I venture to recall a humorous incident 

 which occurred there in the long ago when I first 

 began to know them well. Now it so happened that 



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