Fish-hooks. 33 



should be accidentally cracked while dry or become 

 impaired by age. Until destroyed by moth or by the 

 fish it has taken, when it has paid for its cost and keep 

 and is entitled to a place on the retired list, every fly in 

 one's outfit is practically immortal. 



Then how much more compactly one's stock of flies 

 may be kept, how much more convenient to arrange, to 

 select from, to play with as every angler loves to do in 

 the close season. 



Who that has used flies with an integral gut strand 

 has not lost the one virtue with which even the scoffer 

 credits the angler patience when he has sought to 

 take one fly from his hook and has pulled out perhaps 

 half a dozen ; or, at a critical moment, has not found 

 the gut of the desired fly dry and crooked, and been 

 compelled to lose time and fancied opportunity while 

 he straightened it? 



True, some of these inconveniences are obviated when 

 a gut loop is substituted for the gut strand. But then 

 the integrity of the gut loop becomes open to suspicion 

 before long ; while every time such a fly has been used, 

 and is removed from the cast to give place to another, 

 the loop must be carefully reformed to its original 

 shape and position while still wet and soft, or it will dry 

 with a twist and the fly will not swim true when next 

 used. 



I am at a loss to understand why the eyed form of 

 fly-hook, now so long on the market, is not in almost 

 universal, instead of exceptional, use in this country. I 

 am informed on the very best authority that almost 

 every skilled fly-fisherman in England employs noth- 

 ing else, whether it be for the very smallest midge or 

 the largest salmon-fly. We, as a people, are gener- 



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