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for the sake of the evemng rises, get little or nothing to 

 repay us for our sacrifices and perseverance. The months 

 of July and August are essentially the periods during which 

 chalk-stream trout were wont to indulge in at least a fool'a 

 half hour each evening ; and what scores some of us have 

 made in times past, whilst these brief, mad rises have been 

 on ! But what has now come over the fish ? For the two 

 past seasons I have failed to meet with one single good even- 

 ing rise, though I fish incessantly ; and this year of grace 

 bids fair to be the worst that we South of England men have 

 known — in this connection — during the past quarter of a 

 century. A marked reduction in the number of nocturnal 

 fly may explain the decKne of this branch of 

 sport to some extent, the falling-off in the supply 

 of sedges, caperers, silverhorns, and other luscious- 

 water-bred flies of kindred varieties being most 

 marked. In their place we have those minute aphides, the 

 tiny fishei'man's curse, which are the inevitable accompani- 

 ment of a chilly evening with a nor'-easterly wind succeed- 

 ing a hot day. Not only do we get these wee pests in placfr 

 of the big flies, after which the big trout were 

 wont to souse and flounder, with a reckless dis- 

 regard of personal safety, which, frequently gave us 

 four or five brace of good 'fish in the last hour of day- 

 light, but no sooner does the sun now disappear, than up 

 comes the river fog — and fishing is henceforth a waste of 

 labour. "We are a grumbling set, no doubt; and that we 

 never are but always to be blessed is an orthodox tenet of 

 our creed ; but I do protest that we dry-fly men have been 

 sorely tried during the past two or three seasons. Time 

 was when, in the months of July and August, I was accus- 

 tomed to make good baskets of fish, unfailingly, when the 

 sun had disappeared, but these record scores are a thing of 

 the past, and a brace of good trout are now counted as 

 phenomenal results of an evening rise. And now, after 

 that grumble, we went back to the " Old Barge," and tried 

 our luck with a red-quill gnat. Nothing but small fish 

 were rising, apparently, and some h.alf-dozen eight-inch 

 trout had to be put back. "When the monotony of this kind" 



