126 FLY FISHING FOR TROUT. 



dry fly.'* Carshalton is on the Wandle, where 

 the floating fly was practised early. 



Mr. W. H. Foster of Ashbourne tells me that 

 his firm made duns for dry fly fishing with 

 upright split wings in 1854. 



Hitherto all information has come from the 

 South, but for the next mention of the dry fly 

 we must go to one of the most famous of Scots 

 fishermen. Thomas Tod Stoddart wrote a book 

 called The Angler's Companion to the Rivers 

 and Lochs of Scotland, of which the second 

 edition appeared in 1853. After saying that 

 fishermen often find the first cast the most 

 successful, because the fly is dry, he says that 

 where the fisher has to deal with subtle trout 

 in clear streams, it is not an unusual practice to 

 describe a figure of eight twice or thrice in the 

 air before casting, in order to dry your flies. 

 This practice, or dodge, is much used by the 

 fishers of clear, glassy streams both in England 

 and Wales. Who would have expected to find 

 an account of the dry fly in a writer so typical 

 of Scotland? Yet he is one of the first to 

 describe it. Whether he himself ever used the 

 dry fly I do not know. One would like to think 

 he did. I can find no reference to it in his other 

 books ; but the really interesting thing is that as 

 early as 1853 the knowledge of it should have 

 travelled north of the Tweed. And there is 

 another point worth noticing : the first edition 

 of the Angler's Companion came out in 1847, 



*See the Fishing Gazette, 1 March, 1919. 



