1 8 The Angler's Secret 



consists of but a few simple patterns, the 

 sober-hued varieties tied on the smallest 

 brown-tinted hooks with the slenderest of 

 drab-stained snells and leaders. One par- 

 ticularly seductive pattern of my fancy is 

 a fly of dark blue body and black wings, 

 called the blue - bottle, I think, and 

 another is of similar dressing pale blue 

 body and gray wings. Others, of course, 

 are the black gnat, the brown and gray 

 palmers, the hare's ear, the scale-wing 

 affair, the March brown, the codun, and 

 even the white miller, that is more com- 

 monly used in warm weather and for mid- 

 summer-evening play. Then, I have a 

 homely contrivance of my own invention, 

 a pale bluish-gray hero I develop from 

 the breast feathers of the common dove. 

 Once, on an April day some years 

 ago, while fishing a favorite Pennsylvania 

 stream, I took twelve handsome trout, 

 casting with the gray-wing, light blue fly, 

 and a companion, flailing the darker fly 

 of this variety the first here mentioned, 



