150 LINES IN PLEASANT PLACES 



we of the old guard learned how to cast a fly, abides 

 with me to this day, and with it I, for one, can asso- 

 ciate the hair cast, and a certain ancient pony up in 

 Yorkshire who was famous for his never-failing tail 

 supply of the best white strands, which were con- 

 sidered indispensable by the fishers of all Wharfedale. 

 Halford, however, objected to the line, which certainly 

 was given to waterlogging and sagging at inconvenient 

 times, and eagerly he took up the dressing of modern 

 lines. He had a hand in all the developments of the 

 process, and only declared himself satisfied when the 

 Hawksley line was perfected, leaving others to this 

 day who are aiming at still more betterment. 



How Halford accumulated his experience, building up 

 a fabric so to speak, brick by brick, is told in the Auto- 

 biography and the other books written by him ; and 

 I may, in passing, suggest that in reading Halford in 

 these volumes you must always read very carefully 

 between the lines. You never know when you will 

 find a pearl. The apparently prosaic statement often 

 contains a valuable lesson, and what seems to be a 

 sentence merely recording the capture of a trout of 

 given inches and ounces will be found to have been 

 written with the object of sustaining an argument or 

 enforcing a truth. 



The story in the Autobiography of the fishing on the 

 Wandle in those early years is an instance in point. 

 It is quite a short narrative destitute of embroidery, 

 and seemingly a casual introduction to what shall 

 come after, but it is in reality a revelation of the prac- 

 tical methods that governed him from first to last, and 

 which I venture to sum up in one word " thorough." 

 There is a paragraph telling how he overcame a diffi- 

 culty in circumventing a certain trout that lay about 

 the mouth of a culvert, and habitually flouted the 



