ON ANGLING. 83 



ON ANGLING-I. 



LEARNING TO CAST ON THE LAWN. 



" JOB ! Job's patience never was properly tried. He wasn't 

 a fisherman." Thus in bitterness of heart exclaimed, on a 

 day of peculiar irritation, one of the most ardent anglers 

 that ever fished the Hampshire chalk streams. Perhaps 

 Job was not. The evidence is negative, though the 

 glorious book to which he gives his name expressly dis- 

 courages us from angling for " Leviathan." It is, however, 

 about smaller people of the water than this Leviathan 

 that I mean to write to you. The hope of the most 

 ambitious of " commencing anglers " should be bounded 

 by fifty pounds weight of live salmon at his line's end, and 

 even this is a large measure that few of us ever reach. 

 The present is a day of smaller things again. I am 

 assuming that you will " commence trout-fisher " before 

 angling for the salmon. You cannot do much with either 

 until you have mastery of the first rudiments of casting a 

 fly, but when you have learnt the more or less effective 

 casting of the trout fly you will almost, " in your stride," 

 take the next step which leads to casting of the salmon fly ; 

 so far the more difficult and finer art of the two is the former. 

 I take for granted that you will begin and, further, as 

 trout-fisher, will continue until the end of your life's chapter 

 with a single-handed rod. The big two-handed trout rods 

 with which our gallant forefathers used to belabour the 

 stream are as obsolete as the arquebus, and perhaps belong to 

 a day when fish were not educated to their present high level 

 of wisdom and suspicion. Besides, they were most fatiguing 

 engines almost impossible to wield in that couchant attitude 

 by which only you can, with any success, make your 



