184 TROUT FISHING 



I have said, they nearly upset me when I was playing 

 the best trout of the day. After that I declined to 

 be burdened with them more, dragged them to the 

 nearest roadway, and there left them, in the hope 

 that the not impossible poor body would find them 

 for himself. I have reason to believe that this 

 happened, for next day the chub were gone. It 

 may have been that the poor body coveted the 

 bootlace. One never knows. 



The gravel bed caused us all bad quarters of an 

 hour from time to time that spring. The gravel 

 bed is an inferior sort of fly which appears in vast 

 numbers and makes the trout go half mad — not 

 quite mad — just not so mad as to take any sort of 

 artificial fly. Ap Evan had two counsels for coping 

 with the gravel bed rise. One was to use something 

 else, as a March brown or half stone. The other 

 was to give the affair up as hopeless. My feeling 

 is that he thought more highly of the second plan. 

 Yet people do catch trout during gravel bed rises; 

 and some describe the opportunity afforded by them 

 as a thing not to be missed. All I know is that we 

 made nothing of the business. Some of us even — 

 so it w^as reported — danced with rage at seeing 

 so many and so big trout moving without being 

 able to catch them. It was a new experience to see 

 trout moving in numbers in the Penydwddwr. It 

 was a new experience also to see abundance of fly, 



