xvi THE PRACTICAL ANGLER 



to tie flies of a kind) had carried about North Wales 

 from Waterloo to the Crimean War. Nothing but a 

 shooting-pocket would hold it, and it generally tra- 

 velled in a special compartment of the creel, often, in 

 periods of excitement, actually among the Jish. In 

 these days of eye'd flies and neat tin boxes it presents 

 a most uncouth appearance ; even in those it must have 

 had a picturesque and antique flavour, since a weak 

 youth and would-be faherman from East Anglia, more 

 concerned with the appearances than the realities of 

 sport, used periodically to offer me considerable sums 

 of money for it, honestly affirming that it would be 

 the making of his reputation in his own country, where 

 there were no trout. It still contains some odds and 

 ends of tackle, moth-eaten flies, rotten gut, the wing of 

 an Exmoor snipe, the ear of an East Lothian hare, 

 feathers from a Peebleshire blackcock, hackles of barn- 

 door fowls from anywhere. But what I have been 

 trying to arrive at is the discovery in the depths of one 

 of its pockets of a bunch of wonderfully well preserved 

 spiders, patterns and relics of the Stewart period (speak- 

 ing piscatorially, not historically) and of the rivers he 

 used to fish. What memories an ancient fly-book like 

 this invokes / though here we are only concerned with 

 those relating to the reign of this angling Stewart, and 

 near the end of it too, for this king of Border fishers 

 died in the winter of 1872. I was in East Lothian at 

 the time, and remember hearing much obituary talk 

 and reading long accounts in the Scottish papers of 

 his funeral, which was attended by a goodly following 

 of the craft. He must surely have been regarded as 



