128 T^ROUT FISHING 



out over the water as far as he, and his arm, and his 

 rod will go in the hope that thus he will achieve the 

 further bank. 



There is a line in Virgil descriptive of this situa- 

 tion : " Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore." 

 Many is the disquisition I have heard in the Sixth 

 in ancient days on the poignancy of this simple 

 tribute to the unattainable. But I think I never 

 fully realised it till I had studied a few fly-fishing 

 novices. The yearning countenance, the out- 

 stretched appealing hand (two hands sometimes), 

 the futile dejected rod, and the miserable line cutting 

 an eight, a three, a question mark, and a spread 

 eagle on the surface of the water within a few feet 

 of the hither bank — it is intensely Virgilian. It 

 is the " alight like thistledown " nonsense which 

 undoes the modern novice of course. He has heard 

 that phrase from his youth up. He has gone into 

 the meadows and studied thistledown floating 

 gently on the breeze. And he has sought to make 

 his artificial fly do the like, until it has dawned on 

 him after much discouragement that a fly-rod is 

 capable of doing some work, after which he gets on 

 better. 



The old rods would, of course, do some work, but 

 not the kind of work one wants of a rod in many 

 circumstances now. You cannot use a heavy line 

 with a rod which does not play well down. The 



