100 TROUT FISHING 



habitues the day before that most people fished with 

 winged-flies, and I thought I would try the effect 

 of tiny hackle patterns. The result was a modest 

 triumph of two brace, besides which there were two 

 or three decent fish lost owing to the inadequate 

 hold of the small hooks. As a stranger I felt that 

 I had done very well. 



This is not, of course, quite the same thing as 

 surprising the fish into taking by offering them some 

 strange new thing, for tiny hackle patterns are 

 nothing startling. The startling fly, however, does 

 succeed. A good many anglers must remember 

 how for a series of years on the hard-fished water 

 of a certain well-known society the ingenuity of 

 one or two members used to be directed to inventing 

 new flies, which proved very successful. Some of 

 those flies were strange enough to deserve the names 

 which were given to them " terror," " paralyser," 

 and the like. But they killed fish. It may perhaps 

 have been due to the energy of the chief inventor 

 in designing new patterns and so making the earlier 

 successes seem old-fashioned, but my impression 

 used to be that each new fancy outlived its usefulness 

 by the end of a season, and that next year something 

 different would do better. And I still think that 

 the trout after a time got to know a fancy pattern 

 too well and distrusted it. Such a thing is perhaps 

 more noticeable in lakes where the wet flies used 



