PREFACE vii 



that will be found in the text will be made 

 good by the black and white drawings which 

 illustrate it, and for the excellence of which 

 I am indebted to the artist, Mr. St. Barbe 

 Goldsmith, to whom it is my agreeable duty 

 to take this opportunity of publicly record- 

 ing my sense of obligation for the trouble he 

 has taken to give effect to those points 

 which appeared to me of particular impor- 

 tance. 



The fly-dressing part proper of the book 

 begins at Chapter IV., and if the reader is 

 essentially of a practical turn of mind, and is 

 desirous of avoiding what will no doubt appear 

 to him unnecessary verbiage, I would recom- 

 mend him to skip the first three chapters. 



I may, perhaps, mention that I never had 

 a lesson in fly- dressing in my life. Moreover, 

 such books purporting to deal with the subject 

 as I was able to secure, were all of them either 

 insufficient or more or less unintelligible to 

 me. If he thinks this book fails to supply the 

 deficiency, or what I imagine to be a deficiency 

 (and that in fact was one of the objects with 

 which the book was written), the reader may, 

 perhaps, derive some consolation from the fact 



