1 6 AN ANGLER'S BASKET. 



and grayling fishers to be able to dress a fly at the river side 

 if necessary. A man who can do this, and finds fish taking 

 a fly which is thick on the water, and of which his stock 

 contains no copy, is able to sit down in a sheltered spot and 

 rig up an imitation that may help him to fill his creel in no 

 time. But to an ordinary man the expenditure of time, 

 material, and labour in dressing one's own flies, is far in 

 excess of their price at the tackle-dealer's. 



ON ARTIFICIAL FLIES. 



Most fly-dressers fail to make really good flies because 

 they put too much stuff on the hook rather than too little. 

 Many of them, and this applies especially to the producers 

 of London flies, have no knowledge of the living insect of 

 which they are presumed to be making something of an 

 imitation. An exact imitation of a fly, as every old fly-fisher 

 knows, is quite unnecessary; but those who aim to dress 

 flies accurately should certainly take the trouble to examine 

 the living insect on the water, and learn something of its 

 life-history. Without going through all details, he should 

 know that in the last stage before taking wings the insect 

 crawls out of a case, and works itself away to the surface of 

 the water, aided by the motion of six legs. On certain days, 

 if we could see beneath the surface, we might observe trout 

 taking these ascending insects in scores, and, that being so, 

 you will observe that an imitation of a body, mostly yellow, 

 with very few fibres for the legs, is sufficiently good to attract 

 trout. A hackled fly, as we dress it in the north, makes no 

 attempt to imitate the shape of the winged insect ; but if 

 you will take a living fly and dip it under water you will find 

 that, in all but the very strongly- winged flies, the shape goes 

 irrevocably, though the colour and size remain, and it is to 

 these two points that the fly-dresser's attention should be 

 directed in dressing flies for all rapid streams. 



