68 AN OPEN CREEL 



strand of gut was thicker or finer than any other 

 (except in the case of salmon and drawn gut) has long 

 been a grave trouble to me, so I determined to strain 

 my eyes no more, but to throw the responsibility on 

 the merchants of gut. Therefore I laid in a stock of 

 picked hanks, making the dealer label each in a large 

 round hand, so that, should I by chance be found 

 fishing with a cast tapering the wrong way, the blame 

 should not rest with me. The scheme, I submit, was 

 a sound one, but what is to be done now that all the 

 labels have apparently been torn off, and all the 

 different sizes of gut mixed up at various moments of 

 excitement during fishing ? The expense of repeating 

 those hanks will be prodigious, but I see no other 

 remedy. Disentanglement and re-labelling of the old 

 stock would be too much for anyone. I hope no other 

 anglers are in such a predicament, but I fear it is a 

 fond hope. 



In any case most of us will have the fly trouble in 

 common. The way flies will get into the wrong places, 

 both in book and box, is almost past bearing. There 

 are, I see, many hours of patient labour before me in 

 sorting my scattered collection. Some of them have 

 wandered away into matchboxes, cardboard minnow 

 boxes, and other irregular places from which they must 

 be retrieved. Then there is the question of the half- 

 used fly. Take that medium olive ; it is a bit draggled, 

 yet not so bad but it might be worse. Probably it has 

 never yet caught a fish, though it has covered a few. 

 Is it too battered for further service ? It might come 

 in, perhaps, some day when the fish are well on. Will 

 the fish ever be well on, and, granting that they will 



