IN A WELSH VALLEY 189 



worms and fished to no purpose with a Devon 

 minnow. We had that day a hailstorm which gave 

 me a cold. It was incredibly fierce and chilled me 

 to the marrow, so that I had to go home to get 

 early tea and warmth. 



On the last day of that visit I had a useful lesson 

 in humility. The " local expert " had always 

 appeared to me an overrated person. In London 

 I had ventured to state in conversation that he was 

 not likely to be much more successful than any 

 visitor of reasonable skill. I had to retract all that. 

 I toiled exceedingly all that cold day, struggled 

 with an abominable wind, fished, methought, very 

 well considering, and returned at tea time with 

 eleven fish, convinced that all that man could do in 

 the way of tempting sulky trout had been done by 

 me and that my basket represented the limit of 

 possibility. But I found that Ap Evan had been 

 out and between about half-past one and four had 

 captured some two dozen very nice fish, all with 

 the March brown, a fly wliich had caught me nothing 

 at all. The fact is that local experts are very fine 

 fellows ; we visitors are nought. 



The biggest fish I caught at all was, oddly enough, 

 a dace of nine ounces, a fish which, so far as I could 

 learn, had never been caught there before, though 

 chub are fairly plentiful. I saw it rise at the tail 

 of a long flat, and put my tail fly over it dry. The 



