FLY FISHING FOE TROUT. 99 



should travel over, particularly in windy weather with a 

 wind in your favour. 



Some people in fly-fishing like a ripple, and the wind 

 this or that way. This may be very well in a lake, or in 

 a mill head, or any similar still, quiet water, but on 

 streamy water, if the day is cloudy, I can do very well 

 without any wind at all my experience of fly-fishing 

 being that nineteen-twentieths of your successes depend 

 upon how you put your fly to the fish, and you cannot 

 have full command over your fly, and put it where you 

 please, if you have much wind in any direction. I do not 

 at all object to a good rough upstream wind in a still mill 

 head, but in such cases you do not fish the rises or the 

 fish, you fish the water, probably, with a wet fly, and 

 chance what may come of it, and sometimes a good deal 

 comes of it, but that is a very different thing from putting 

 your fly neatly over a rising fish and inducing him to 

 mistake it for the brother of the one he has just swallowed. 

 That is the acme of fly fishing. But I am teaching my 

 pupils to run before they can walk, and I must return on 

 my steps. 



Having thoroughly mastered the length of line he first 

 put out, so as to be able to throw it in any direction he 

 desires straightly and truly, the angler may let out more 

 and more line until he reaches the outside of his capability, 

 which, with a ten foot or eleven foot rod, will be something 

 more or less under twenty yards. Say fifty feet, and that 

 is from four and a half to five times the length of the rod, 

 which will perhaps be as much as he ever will master. 

 But throwing a line is one thing, and having full command 

 of it after you have thrown it, is quite another. How 

 often, when I have hurled out a tremendous line, have I 

 seen my fish come up fairly, only to be scratched or 



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