COTTON AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 81 



Dickie Routledge had perhaps by that time 

 acquired some of the glamour that belongs to 

 the legendary, but he was reputed to have been 

 able regularly to take one hundred trout on an 

 average day, and I quite believe it. These 

 records, as far as they go, show that bags were 

 not exceptionally heavy in Cotton's time. 

 Possibly poaching accounts for this : he makes 

 bitter complaint of it. 



Before the time of Stewart fly fishing was 

 not much practised in summer or calm hot 

 weather and in low clear water. Consequently 

 in Cotton's day, either a cloudy day or a water 

 clearing after rain was preferred at any time, 

 and in clear water in summer either wind or 

 cloud was essential. In the spring, on a rough 

 day, fish the still deeps : in a calm or light 

 breeze the fast streams. The artificial mayfly 

 is little use except on a rough windy day. 

 March, April, May and June are the chosen 

 months, and of course July and August always 

 have been notoriously bad for the sunk fly. The 

 floating fly has changed all our weather lore, 

 for it succeeds best on days when the sunk is 

 hopeless and will kill in a wider range of 

 weather than any other lure, natural or 

 artificial. The directions as to weather and 

 water in the seventeenth century are the same 

 as in the nineteenth before Stewart wrote. 



* (page 70) Sir David Train, the distinguished Director of 

 the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, has thrown himself whole- 

 heartedly into the quest, in which all the resources of Kew, 

 helped by the India Office, have been engaged. But he cannot 

 yet say with certainty what the substance was. 



