20 How to Fish for Salmon, 



cries the learned Pundit, with distended cheek and 

 corrugated brow ; a gaudy fly kills best here, and 

 a sober one there. I doubt this much ; and though 

 my experience in salmon fishing is not so extensive 

 as that of many others, yet I have killed fish in 

 different rivers with flies not bearing the remotest 

 resemblance to the standard fly of the water, — not 

 only killed fish, but as many as any one. This is 

 not intended as a boasts but merely to show that 

 prejudice in angling is just like prejudice in any- 

 thing else, another phrase for want of reflection or 

 idleness of research." 



Quite true. Experience and observation go a 

 great way in making a successful angler. The 

 fishermen of certain rivers are often very pre- 

 judiced. In their experience they have seen that 

 certain flies, generally of their own making, are very 

 killing, — that is to say, they have found them so, and 

 do not care for changing. Old Robertson was 

 mighty fond of the Gled Tail. " Aye, send me 

 some feathers of the gled, and I'll be muckle 

 obleeged to ye ! " I showed him a fly, one autumn 

 some years since, which had been most successful 

 in taking fish in a river I had been fishing, about 

 thirty miles from the Lochy. " Ah," he said with a 

 kind of sneer, ** no good on this water." " Well," said 

 I, " I mean to try it." '* Weel, ye'll soon change it." 

 We parted, he to fish the lower part of the beat 



