180 THE VALLEY OF ENCHANTMENT 



Frenchmen in forty minutes at Salamanca, so, I felt, 

 might laurels be won, or at least a fish landed, in half 

 an hour. Presently the cock-nosed skiff bore me dancing 

 over the waves ; the boatman bid me cast into a rattling 

 stream and bring the fly round into the comparative calm. 

 I did so until six times; the seventh, or thereby, there 

 was a slight commotion behind the Bulldog so slight 

 as might have escaped attention in the tumult, had I not 

 caught sight of a fin above the surface, anc). felt a tiny 

 twitch on the line. Nothing more. That fish may have 

 been the 40-pounder in quest of which I have vainly 

 squandered so many days, or he may have been but an 

 impertinent grilse of 5 Ib. A couple of inches of fin 

 thirty yards away afford a very slender basis for com- 

 putation. Vain were all attempts to wheedle him into a 

 closer intimacy ; a sunk fly and a jigging one, a fast fly 

 and a slow one, all proved ineffective, and we floated on. 

 Twenty yards lower down the line suddenly stopped ; up 

 went the rod, and I was fast in something solid. A rock ? 

 no, a delicious wobble gave assurance that the obstacle 

 was alive, and presently the reel began to revolve, slowly 

 at first more swiftly wildly at last, as the fish tore 

 away to the distant shore. My reel held a hundred and 

 twenty yards of trusty line, but, as I stepped out of the 

 boat, there was parlously little left upon the drum. Once 

 ashore, however, I could exert the utmost pressure. It is 

 not always present to the angler's mind what that utmost 

 amounts to. Good treble gut will stand a strain, say, of 

 8 or 10 Ib. Pulling with a rod of eighteen feet, held at 

 an angle of forty-five degrees, you cannot break such gut. 

 How then does it happen that such gut sometimes is 

 broken by a fish ? Indubitably because one of two things 



