216 AN OPEN CREEL 



apparatus, consisting of ropes and scythe - blades. 

 Therefore, the discovery of the soft black hackle fly 

 could not be put to a really satisfactory test. It 

 deceived, however, some two and a half brace of little 

 fish besides a brace of tiny grayling ; all these were, of 

 course, returned, and they at least afforded some 

 occupation. Over in the college cricket-ground much 

 cricket was being played, and the eye was apt to 

 wander from the water to the match ground, where 

 the captain of Haverford College was showing what 

 can be done against British bowling, and playing a 

 magnificent uphill game. Moreover, there was a 

 Wykehamist fishing. 1 He had, he said, caught twenty 

 sizeable trout on the fishery during the term, which is 

 no small achievement on that water when the exigencies 

 of public-school life, so feelingly described by Sir Edward 

 Grey, are taken into account. With the coming of the 

 evening rise, the Winchester boy has to go, and thus 

 he loses the best hour of the summer day. But the 

 disability probably helps to teach him to fish ; he has 

 to make the best use of his spare time, and he wastes 

 none of it, like the rest of us, in idling. Certainly there 

 was little in the theory of dry-fly fishing that this young 

 fisherman did not know, and the way he handled his 

 rod testified to his practice. 



After tea, what had been merely a passing and re- 

 passing of the public and its dogs became a procession, 



1 John Hamilton Mitchell, probably the most successful fisher- 

 man Winchester has produced since Sir Edward Grey. In the 

 season of 1905 he killed forty-five trout on Chalkley's water. Those 

 who have read Sir Edward Grey's book will realize what that means. 

 Untimely death cut short a career of more than usual promise while 

 he was still at the school. 



