WATERS OF YOUTH 19 



assiduously, I put their attitude down to jealousy. 

 On the great day they went off to fish some private 

 water on the Wye, and I in my wanderings came upon 

 this little nameless stream. From it, with a worm, I 

 extracted half a dozen trout of a quarter of a pound each, 

 and returned triumphant, to find the older anglers talking 

 gloomily of low water and hopeless conditions. In a 

 word, they had two small trout between them, and I 

 had " wiped their eye." They admitted it generously, 

 and from that day I was a confirmed trout-fisher, with 

 views on the uncertainty of the sport, and an ex- 

 perience whence illustrations might be drawn with 

 economy. But on the subject of catching trout with 

 a fly I was, and remained for some time after, reticent. 

 It had been pointed out to me rather forcibly that 

 samlets were not trout, and that if one treated them 

 as such one would go to prison. I rather feared that 

 I had treated some samlets as trout, even going so far 

 as to assert that they were trout ; at any rate, they 

 were all the trout that I had so far caught with the fly. 

 Of other trout-fishing in the golden days, memories 

 centre for the most part round a certain insignificant 

 brook in the western Midlands, in which, year by year, 

 I used to perform prodigies of patience, in obedience 

 to the law that causes the angler to strive after the 

 unattainable. Looking back, I can see that March 

 was rather early for trout-fishing in such a stream, 

 but a schoolboy's logic rose superior to counsels of 

 perfection. If the holidays began in March, contem- 

 poraneously more or less with the end of all coarse 

 fishing, it followed without further argument that 

 trout-fishing began at precisely that date ; holidays 



