THE EVENING 85 



wrote very strongly, asking what he thought we 

 could do about it. He replied to the effect that the 

 best thing we could do about it was for the future to 

 " Keep quite calm." 



If memory serves me, Scott's little friend Marjorie 

 Fleming, in precocious rhyme, immortalised the fowl 

 who was " more than usual calm, She did not give a 

 single dam," when the ducklings undutifully made 

 for the water, or when some other domestic event 

 happened, whose precise nature eludes me. Halford 

 meant, of course, that I should be exceeding calm 

 like that, even when my fly undutifully sought the 

 thistles, or when other untoward things happened. 

 But he meant more. I might conceivably win 

 through an evening rise without profanity, but, as 

 for keeping quite calm, that is another thing. For, 

 though I have seen many an evening rise and 

 occasionally done right well, it passes my skill to 

 greet a new one with calmness unless for some reason 

 I do not particularly want to catch fish, which almost 

 never happens. Usually I want to catch something 

 very badly, because tea time has found me a 

 shattered wreck with nothing in my creel. And my 

 proceedings during the stages of the rise are too 

 often as follows. The evening rise, as said, begins 

 at 5 p.m. Its first portion consists of a few, very 

 few, depressed fish making tiny dimples at nothing. 

 As also said, I cannot catch these fish. I use a 



