lo SOUTH COUNTRY TROUT STREAMS 



wings or hackle will suffice for quite a couple of 

 hours' use. I have worked a paraffined May-fly 

 hard for half an hour or so, killed fish with it, re- 

 placed it in the fly case, using in its stead another 

 specimen, and several hours later have returned to 

 it and found no need for any fresh application of 

 the oil. The power of paraffin must have come as* 

 a revelation to many anglers. 



The chief artificial trout flies of the southern 

 counties may, perhaps, be divided into two groups, 

 one consisting of those patterns which are more or 

 less common to the chalk and the chalk and gravel 

 streams, the other of the patterns used on the more 

 impetuous waters, moorland and other, of Devon- 

 shire, Somerset, and Cornwall. To the former 

 belong the May-fly, olive and blue duns, pale watery 

 dun, iron blue dun, yellow dun, with their various 

 spinners or imagines, alder, sedges, grannom and 

 Welshman button ; to the latter, in addition to 

 duns and spinners, the famous blue upright and 

 even more famous March brown. The last- 

 named insect is not, so far as I can learn, a chalk 

 stream fly at all, though curiously enough it is 

 often used on such waters both as a wet and a 

 dry fly, with no small degree of success. Lately, 

 hearing of the March brown on the upper Lea, I 

 asked an angler, whose knowledge of that trout 

 stream is extensive and peculiar, whether he had 

 ever seen the natural insect there. He replied that 

 he had not seen it once in the course of more 

 than a quarter of a century's regular angling in 

 the stream. But there is a dainty little fly of the 

 Ephenieridcs order, which, until closely examined, 

 resembles pretty closely the March brown in all 

 save size. This is the turkey brown which 



