THE DEVONSHIRE AVON 



understand my predilection for the river or indeed 

 how anybody caught any fish there. The trees were 

 too thick, the banks were too high, and the wading 

 too rough. It must be said he was rather middle- 

 aged in habit of body as well as in years, and a very 

 middhng fisherman. But he was one of those enthu- 

 siasts who fish a great deal in dreams, and thoroughly 

 enjoy the prospect of days and hours that are so rarely 

 fulfilled. And after all why should they not ? I re- 

 member, too, on a certain day in early June when the 

 fish were taking nicely, encountering a young marine 

 sitting gloomily munching his sandwiches on the bank 

 of the Avon at one of its open interludes. He com- 

 plained bitterly of the secretive nature of the stream, 

 and that he had been sitting all the morning by the big 

 open pool beside him waiting to see a fish rise. As the 

 fish were then feeding in the stickles and runs his vigil 

 had of course been bootless. He proved, poor fellow, 

 to be an embryo dry-fly fisherman, nurtured up in 

 Hertfordshire or some such country, and a victim of 

 dry-fly literature in what may be called its arrogant 

 days. He honestly thought that * chuck-and-chance-it ' 

 fishing, as he called it, had disappeared among sports- 

 men everywhere, and that waiting for a rise and throw- 

 ing a dry fly over it was the only legitimate method of 

 catching a trout. And the Avon seemed to him a 

 deplorably awkward river for such noble endeavours, as 

 indeed it was. Of course he was young and hadn't 

 been properly ' bred a fisherman.' So presuming on 

 the discrepancy of our years, which for that matter I 

 could gladly have dispensed with, I endeavoured to 

 get him into a more knowledgeable frame of mind, 

 Q 241 



