FIRST EMPTYING. 21 



bring the flies on the water, the fish are unfamiliar with 

 them. 



" FIRST PRINCIPLES" OF ANGLING. 



It cannot be too strongly impressed on inexperienced 

 anglers that neither tackle nor the finest flies in the world 

 will ensure a basket of fish unless several matters of even 

 more importance are attended to. Two* 'first principles'* 

 are necessary in angling : one to know where the fish are, 

 the other to avoid letting them know where you are. Man 

 is a conceited beast of prey, constantly wandering about on 

 errands of destruction or striving to assert his own immaculate 

 superiority, and so supreme in his self-satisfaction that you 

 cannot persuade even half of him that anybody or anything 

 else can be as sharp as he is. A friend of mine once dropped 

 sixteen worms, fat and well liking, off a bridge over a little 

 river to a half-pound trout below. The trout took them all. 

 Then my self-complacent, wicked friend attached a tiny 

 hook and six yards of the finest gut to a precisely similar 

 attraction. The fish eyed the arrangement out of the corner 

 of his eyes, yet he neither winked nor moved. The 

 experimenter dangled it lovingly before his very snout, but 

 here the fish exhibited more sense than the average human 

 being he kept his mouth shut at an awkward moment. 

 He took ten more worms, unattached, but the telegraphic 

 arrangement he would have none of. 



Thus man prowls about, believing he is altogether a 

 superior kind of diddler a humbug beyond compare. He 

 talks about killing time while time is quietly killing him ; 

 but that anybody can be up to his little games is out of the 

 question. 



Richard Jefferies, as keen an observer as ever lived, spent 

 weeks in trying to trap a rabbit where there were thousands 

 of them before he discovered that the sense of smell is so 

 strongly developed in this " vermin " that the odour of his 



