Leaders. 107 



ard should stand eight pounds steady pull with a spring- 

 balance ; the drawn gut measures thereon about No. 31, 

 and should stand two and a half pounds. New gut of 

 No. 30 should not break short of four and a half to five 

 pounds tested in this manner. I now use a gauge simi- 

 lar to that employed to determine the thickness of violin 

 strings. It is very easily made, and is quite satisfactory. 

 A A represents two pieces of brass touching at one 

 end, but separated about an ordinarily fine sewing-nee- 

 dle's thickness at the other. The adjacent edges must 

 be straight. On each side of the closed ends a flat piece 

 of brass is placed, JB, and the whole united with soft 

 solder and then finished up. Its total length is two and 

 a half inches. One of the limbs, 



B 



Q 



N one and three - quarter inches 



li J .3 J * A A! t* 



lon ?> ' s divided it tenths f 

 / an inch, as shown. Some sim- 



Fig 19 ilar device will be found useful 



for purposes of comparison by 



those who tie their own flies and leaders, enabling such 

 to duplicate a satisfactory size an effort liable to be at- 

 tended with mistake if the eye and memory alone are 

 relied on. Of course an average must be taken, as no 

 bundle of gut runs perfectly uniform at least as far as 

 I have ever seen. 



Having obtained the gut, the next step is the dyeing. 



The books on angling contain receipts without num- 

 ber for this purpose, but my experiments induce me to 

 believe that two, or at most three of these, answer every 

 purpose. I have endeavored to ascertain with some de- 

 gree of certainty how much the dyeing process weakens 

 the gut, but the investigation is hedged about with dif- 

 ficulties. I first tried looping half a dozen strands of 



