36 CHATS ON ANGLING. 



and cast. Where is that fly? Caught up somewhere in your struggles 

 with the trout. It is engagingly fixed in your coat, about the small of 

 your back. So you lay your rod down again, take off your coat, and 

 extricate your fly with your knife at the cost of some of the cloth of your 

 coat. Pack up your things and trudge home somewhat annoyed with 

 yourself and thinking of the opportunities you had lost, and determining 

 next evening to have some points of gut attached to suitable flies in your 

 cap, ready for the fray — no more threading eyes under such adverse 

 conditions for you. 



Next evening you repair to the place where you know the big 

 trout lie and are sure to rise well. Fully equipped in every detail, 

 and determined not to be induced to hurry, but to take things quietly 

 and composedly, you reach your station. What is that in the meadow 

 over there ? A mist, by Jove ! And soon the aforesaid mist begins to 

 rise on the water, most effectually stopping all hope of sport; so reluctantly 

 you leave the water side, a sadder and a wiser man, reflecting that the 

 evening rise is by no means the certainty you had fondly hoped. 



Of course it is not always so. I recollect one evening on the Test, 

 when, after a hot day with scarce a semblance of a feeding fish, except 

 tailers, there was a grand evening rise, and on a big red quill I got seven 

 fish, almost from the same spot, in little over a quarter of an hour ; but 

 these days are too infrequent to alter my stated opinion that the evening 

 rise is an overrated pleasure, and generally produces vexation of spirit. 



If you do fish in the evening hours, recollect that you must be just as 

 cautious in approaching fish as if it were broad daylight ; that any sign of 

 drag will as effectually put a fish down as in the earlier hours. Your fly 

 must float and cock as jauntily as in the morning, but you lose the 

 chief charm of fishing the floating fly, namely, that you cannot spot your 

 fish in the water and watch their movements ; you have to cast at a rise, 

 or where you imagine a rise to have been. Use a small fly at first 

 and then a little later change to a big red quill, or, if the sedge flies are 

 out, to a small dark sedge. You can afford to have a point of stronger 

 gut, for you will have often to play a fish pretty hard, and they don't 

 appear to be so gut shy as the evening closes in. But as soon as you can 

 no longer see your sedge fly on the water, reel up. Fishing in the dark is 

 no true sport, and it is uncommonly near to poaching. 



