THE COMPLETE ANGLER. 68 



the further or nearer bank as the wind serves your turn ; which 

 also will be with and against you on the same side, several times 

 in an hour, as the river winds in its course, and you will be 

 forced to angle up and down by turns accordingly ; but are to 

 endeavor, as much as you can, to have the wind evermore on 

 your back : and always be sure to stand as far off the bank as 

 your length will give you leave, when you throw to the contrary 

 side ; though when the wind will not permit you so to do, and 

 that you are constrained to angle on the same side whereon you 

 stand, you must then stand on the very brink of the river, and 

 cast your fly at the utmost length of your rod and line, up or 

 down the river, as the gale serves. 



It only remains, touching your line, to inquire whether your 

 two hairs, next to the hook, are better twisted or open ;* and for 



* This is clearly a slip of the pen; he means "better twisted than 

 open." The inconveniences here spoken of as attending the use of hair- 

 snoods (or snells, as the American angler calls the short line on which the 

 hook is bent), are now generally avoided by the substitution of silk-worm 

 gut. Saunders, in his Complete Fisherman, 1724, is the first to make 

 mention of this material, now so essential to the angler's outfit. The 

 passage, which occurs p. 91-2, is so interesting that I transcribe it : " The 

 Swiss and the Milanese, and the inhabitants of the more mountainous 

 parts of Italy, are esteemed the greatest artists at trout fishing, perhaps in 

 the world ; and it is not unlikely it may be occasioned by the many fine 

 trout rivers which they have among the Alps, and falling from these moun- 

 tains either into the Po on the south, the Rhine on the north, or the 

 Rhone on the west sides of that country. These, they tell us, make a fine 

 and exceeding strong hair or line, resembling a single hair, which is drawn 

 from the bowels of the silk-worms, the glutinous substance of which is 

 such, that like the cat's gut which makes strings for the viol and violin, of 

 an unaccountable strength, so this will be so strong, as nothing of so small 

 a size can equal it in nature ; for it is rather smaller than the single hair 

 ordinarily used in fishing, and strong as the catgut itself; so that with 

 these lines, they secure the strongest fish in those rivers where they have 

 some trouts very large, as well as other fish. I have seen an imitation of 

 these worm-gut lines in England, and indifferent strong too, but not like 

 those I have mentioned, in Italy ; yet these will hold a fish of a good size 

 too, if she be not too violent, and does not nimbly harness herself among 

 weeds and roots of trees, where she cannot be pulled out." 



The silk-worm gut is brought to us from Spain, Italy, or China (for a 

 full description, see Blaine's Encyclopedia of Rural Sports) ; some ex- 

 periments in its manufacture have been made in New Jerseys but not with 



