io 4 THE TROUT ARE RISING 



So far, I must confess that, though I had 

 occasionally employed the dry fly when necessary, 

 the wet fly had appealed to me more and I re- 

 garded myself as first and foremost a wet-fly man. 

 But now I began to feel the genuine dry-fly 

 enthusiasm, though far be it from me to institute 

 comparisons or to dogmatize as to preferences. 

 On this point two golden sentences from that 

 charming and highly educative book Lord Grey's 

 " Fly Fishing " may appropriately be quoted. 

 " I have," he says, " at various times started in 

 my own mind so many theories which have been 

 suggested by experience and afterwards upset by 

 it, that I do not desire to press anyone to accept 

 an opinion unless there is anything in his own 

 experience which goes to support it. There is 

 only one theory about angling in which I have 

 perfect confidence, and that is that the two words, 

 least appropriate to any statement about it, are 

 the words ' always ' and * never '." 



Touching dry-fly fishing, he sums up the art 

 in these words: "The effort, in short, is to 

 make the trout notice the fly without noticing 

 anything else. It is in this that the fine art of 

 dry-fly fishing consists." Obviously the same 

 principle applies to grayling, though of the two 

 fish the grayling is far the less shy. 



The time the visitor from Stroud and I had 

 together by the waterside that day, from early 

 forenoon until 4 o'clock, had its sparkling interval. 

 During those days the wise thing was to be at the 

 waterside soon after breakfast. Early in autumn 



