COTTON AND HIS CONTEMPOEARIES. 75 



ever useful hint that when you cannot see what 

 the fish are taking, you should try a small 

 hackle. Venables noticed for the first time that 

 trout usually do not come 'on' a fly until it is 

 fairly plentiful, and that they take it best when 

 it is just going off, when they will often refuse 

 other flies even if on the water. He also 

 noticed that occasionally they changed from 

 one fly to another two or three times a day. 

 Cotton's dressings are good. It is difficult to 

 know what his flies looked like, for the same 

 dressings produce different results in different 

 hands, and it is easy to exaggerate his excel- 

 lence. But he insists on a slender body carried 

 not too far down the hook, and of this he makes 

 a great point. The thick bodied London 

 fly he condemns utterly. Chetham's dressings, 

 however, are far the best of any of his 

 contemporaries . 



Concealment was got not by kneeling or 

 crawling, as we do, but by standing well off 

 the bank, and throwing a long line, fishing, 

 as Cotton said, fine and far off; and they 

 certainly did throw much longer lines than the 

 absence of a reel might make one suppose. 

 With their long whippy rods and light horse- 

 hair lines, casting against the wind was next 

 to impossible. It was not practised till long 

 after the seventeenth century. The fisherman 

 manoeuvred to get the wind behind him. The 

 thickness of the cast, and even double hair was 

 thick for clear Derbyshire streams and cunning 



