JULY 167 



short he will report you as having snatched the fly away 

 from the fish. You have a partiality, it may be, for 

 some particular fly (you must be less or more than a 

 human angler if you have not) which you propose to 

 display upon the bosom, say, of Tay or Tweed. Speedily 

 will the boatman recall you to a sense of your position. 

 More than common must be your resolution and courage 

 if you persist in the exercise of private judgment, and 

 hesitate to attach to your line whatever your tyrant pre- 

 scribes as appropriate to prevailing conditions of sky and 

 water and the idiosyncrasies of fish in that particular 

 river. My private conviction is that such idiosyncrasies 

 exist only in the imagination of anglers. During the con- 

 siderable segment of a century that I have been at the 

 game, I have witnessed a complete revolution in the 

 hypothetical preferences of salmon in different rivers. 

 Lures are described as indispensable now, which, thirty 

 years ago, would have brought inextinguishable derision 

 upon the greenhorn who proposed to apply them to the 

 catching of fish. Thirty or forty years further back 

 William Scrope had detected the fallacy in his own 

 shrewd way. 



'A great deal of mystery,' says he in his inimitable Days and 

 Nights of Salmon Fishing, ' is made on every river as to the flies 

 you should fish with. Thus when a novice arrives at his fishing 

 station he sends for the oracle of the river, pulls out his book 

 crammed as closely as a pot of pemmican, and displays before 

 him the devices of an Eaton, an Ustonson, or a Chevalier. 

 Nothing dazzled, Donald much admires what one may be, and 

 what the other; this he rejects as useless, that he laughs to 

 scorn. . . . He examines some twenty dozen of your best flies, 

 and, pulling out one from the number, tells you that might 

 serve well enough if it had different wings, a different body, 



