NORTHUMBERLAND 



probably of ash, shod with a spike and a hook, and at 

 the other end the net was strung on a large fixed 

 hoop of wood. It was a tremendous net for quarter- 

 pounders and an odd half-pounder, as it towered above 

 the angler's head while he used it, like many others 

 elsewhere, as a prop and support, for the Wear was 

 a wading river. You couldn't wade the Wear with- 

 out this particular type of implement. You might 

 negotiate other rivers successfully perhaps, and rivers 

 too, exactly like the Wear, but you couldn't fish the 

 Durham stream properly without this tremendous 

 accessory. It would have been wholly unorthodox. 

 You might be all right with a short-handled net slung 

 conveniently at your back for a time if you were pre- 

 pared to outrage every local tradition. But you would 

 be drowned some day to a certainty. It might be for 

 years, but it wouldn't be for ever, that you would 

 escape this untimely fate. And this in spite of the 

 fact that waders were not yet in use up there and you 

 could swim like a duck. 



The champion fisherman of that neighbourhood 

 who chiefly voiced this unwritten code, and even 

 published part of it, was the headmaster of an almost 

 derelict grammar school. He wrote a treatise on 

 trout-fishing, and a very good one too, illustrated by 

 himself with coloured plates of flies. He had scarcely, 

 I think, ever fished any other river but the Wear and 

 its tributaries, so that his utterances were unavoidably 

 flavoured with limitations, to say nothing of prejudices. 

 All rivers in the south of England, for instance, were 

 sluggish canals, and all the trout fat and lethargic, and 

 (if memory serves me) quite easy to catch, with the 



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