122 FLY-FISHING 



XXX 



Should the political pendulum swing back in time to 

 enable Sir Edward Grey to fulfil the confident 

 anticipations of his party, his essay on Fly- 

 fishing 1 will command an interest far beyond that 

 of a mere treatise on his favourite sport. Indeed, it 

 possesses that interest now. Even men with souls so 

 dead as to be insensible to the angler's infatuation 

 may peruse with pleasure Sir Edward Grey's memories 

 of early Winchester days. They may listen as he tells 

 with artless egoism how, arriving as a little north- 

 country boy in that unfamiliar southern landscape, 

 he wandered forth upon those meadows of wondrous 

 green, and beheld, in the network of channels inter- 

 secting them, trout of a length and circumference 

 undreamt of in the burns of his native Northumber- 

 land. They may follow him in his fruitless exercise 

 of the art of fly-fishing as he then understood it, 

 until that fertile moment when the higher mystery 

 of the craft being revealed to him, he acquired the 

 knack of presenting the dry fly. They may share his 

 boyish worship of the man who caught more than any 

 one else. 



' He fished nearly every day, and from watching him long 

 and often I became aware of certain peculiarities in his 

 style. ... He dried his fly harder and more rapidly than 

 any one I ever saw, and brought it floating over the fish 

 oftener in a given space of time. His rod and line used to 

 make a very busy sound in the air as he dried his fly. It 

 1 Fly-fisUng. By Sir Edward Grey. London : Dent and Co. 1899. 



