THE EVENING 81 



may be that one's conviction of the difficulty of fish 

 which are taking spinners is due to the geographical 

 situation of the piece of water where one usually 

 fishes. On another stretch one might find them 

 easy. 



After the fall of spinner comes the beginning of the 

 evening rise proper when the blue-winged olives are 

 hatching out. And here we are faced with what 

 to me seems the greatest mystery that there is in 

 dry-fly fishing. This is the extraordinary fact that 

 on two evenings which seem exactly alike in point 

 of weather, quantity of fly, rising of trout, and so 

 on, the effect of fishing is so different. On the first 

 you may rise and hook every fish to which you can 

 place a fly properly. On the second you can do 

 nothing at all, or almost nothing. In some cases 

 the fish simply take no notice of any fly you offer 

 them. In others you get an occasional false or short 

 rise. In others the effect of floating a pattern of any 

 kind over them is to put them down at once. Unless 

 this curious contrast is also in some way due to the 

 light, I have absolutely no theory to account for it. 

 Nor did I ever meet any one who had. 



Occasionally I have imagined that I have solved 

 the problem by finding a particular fly which would 

 do the trick on some such evening. I have, for 

 instance, at times been disposed to claim infallibility 

 for Halford's blue-winged olives, for the orange 



