PRACTICAL FLY-FISHING. 41 



with the silk. In the most approved specimens of this 

 make the wire is in the center of the line. The idea is 

 to give a stiffness and weight to the line without increas- 

 ing the size a most important point when you are fish- 

 ing with the wind against you. The great point in 

 adjusting your fly-trout fishing tackle is to be careful that 

 the whole tackle, from rod-butt to end of leader, tapers 

 truly, right to the fly. I do not know of a better rale, or 

 one more likely to facilitate the learner in the pleasant 

 art than this, or one more likely to increase the pleasure 

 of the " Senior Angler" by its observance. Having thus 

 briefly touched on the subject of the rod, reel and line, I 

 now come to refer to the leader, about which I have some 

 more extended observations to make, as it is quite within 

 the power of the angler to tie his own. 



1 need scarcely remind the reader that the gut used 

 by the fisherman is made from the fluid silk, before it is 

 spun, of the silk-worm. The chief part of it comes 

 from Murcia, a Moorish town in Spain, and the longest 

 is seldom over twenty-three inches in length. A Mr. 

 Eamsbottom showed some of that length at the Great 

 Fisheries Exhibition, held in London in 1883, and it was 

 said to be the longest of the season of 82-3. Whether 

 the larger American worms will ever produce longer gut, 

 available and marketable, remains to be seen. Person- 

 ally, I do not doubt that it will eventually be done, and 

 I hope to have a finger in the doing. I have myself 

 seen a single strand of gut measuring six feet in length, 

 of good quality, of American production. 



Good gut should be round and without opacity. No 

 gut with a blemisL ought to be admitted ; but as there is 



