WHITEADDER AND LAUDERDALE 



the strength of the opposition he has to encounter Hes 

 not so much in the hankering after new and strange 

 things but in the stubborn adherence to old party- 

 lines that arose from conditions which have long 

 passed away, and of which the average modern voter 

 knows nothing at all. You will see rods in use that 

 have long vanished, and with good reason, from EngHsh 

 river-sides. There may still be seen here the wobbly 

 eleven- or twelve-footer, heavy for one hand yet hardly 

 demanding two, that recall one's boyhood, when the 

 ethics of rod-making were in a torpid condition and 

 a hardy superstition still held the field, which fitted 

 a rod to a stream by a sort of geometrical process 

 almost as you might measure a man for a suit of 

 clothes. That some of these unhandy implements 

 should be still wielded by blacksmiths or rural dominies 

 or postmen of the older generation would be nothing, 

 but you frequently see them in the hands of a young 

 and different type of angler, who has obviously none 

 of these reasons for adhering to a weapon that has 

 nothing to recommend it. 



The south countryman is apt to go to the opposite 

 extreme and to fuss about technicalities in rods and 

 the pattern "of flies before he has acquired a reasonable 

 knowledge of how to use either. The tyro is be- 

 wildered, and no wonder, by the printed fly-lore of 

 some famous expert, not being able to read into it a 

 due sense of proportion. And then daunted at the 

 seeming prospect of having to graduate in the abstruse 

 science of entomology before he can hope to become 

 a fisherman he hails with reHef the advertisement of 

 a new patent fly. It is not like anything in the heavens 



365 



