104 LETTERS TO YOUNG SPORTSMEN. 



hope, the fish to be. Just what those places of good hope 

 are we will discuss a little later. For the moment I still 

 have a word or two to say about the cast. 



You have realised, no doubt, that, graceful though 

 your figure be, the trout will view it with no gratified admira- 

 tion, but with terror, rather, and will inevitably quit feeding 

 if he catches sight of you. Hide yourself from his gaze, there- 

 fore, by all possible means, but especially by keeping low. 

 And after what I have written it will be evident that, lowly 

 as your own attitude may be, the rod, if you brandish it 

 strictly in accord with my foregoing instructions, will be waving 

 high in the air ; the light of Heaven will glint on it ; the fish 

 are likely to perceive the glint and, accepting the glint as a 

 portent of trouble, will dart off to their dark sanctuaries. 

 Now, it was necessary in the first instance to instruct you 

 in this more or less vertical brandishing of the rod, because it 

 is thus that the line is most easily sent out. But, once you 

 have acquired this first element of the art, you must go on 

 to acquire further refinements. You must learn the horizontal 

 cast. It differs in no essential, except in the difference of 

 plane, from the vertical, but it is a little more difficult because 

 the line and the fly are at no moment of it more than a very 

 few feet above the water or the land ; therefore any little 

 slackness allows them to touch water or to touch land, as 

 the case may be. The cast has to be rather more carefully 

 made, therefore, than the cast wherein the rod is moving in 

 a vertical plane, just because a smaller error will bring the 

 throw to grief. It does not allow so much margin for error. 

 For my own part I do not find it nearly so easy to keep my 

 wrist out of the actively working mechanism of the throw 

 in this cast as in the other. I am compelled to use my wrist, 

 though I try not to do so. Whereas in the former throw all 

 worked, from the elbow, in a vertical plane, so here all, from 

 the elbow forearm, rod and line works in a horizontal 

 plane ; that is the whole difference. If you have the blessed 

 advantage of ambidexterity, you must acquire this throw 

 with your left hand as well as with your right. If not, if 

 you are condemned, like your unfortunate mentor, to single- 

 handedness, you must practise this horizontal cast back- 

 handed as well as fore-handed. I need hardly point out to 



