SOME WILTSHIRE MEMORIES 



wet fly nay nor yet to two of them fished across and 

 down when the wind served that way. It makes my 

 blood run cold to think that I have landed on occasions, 

 when revisiting the scenes of youth, four, five, or even 

 six brace of good fish on the Mildenhall water of the 

 Kennet in that dastard fashion. But then I didn't 

 know any better, though in the early eighties perhaps 

 I should have. About the same time a great friend of 

 mine, who, though very keen, was a most indifferent 

 fisherman, even with wet fly, killed ten brace on one 

 occasion by the same reprehensible method in the half 

 mile of water just below the town of Marlborough, 

 and that meant about five-and-twenty pounds weight. 

 He never showed the least contrition to his dying day 

 for the many fish he had taken out of the river with 

 two wet flies, nor could I ever induce him to see eye 

 to eye with me and agree that both of us, he par- 

 ticularly, as a perpetual resident, ought to look back 

 almost with shame upon those many pleasant days 

 among the water meadows below Savernake forest, 

 some of which we had enjoyed together. But then he 

 never consorted with dry-fly men or even read them. 

 They hadn't yet got up so high as Marlborough, and 

 it was impossible for me at second hand to depict 

 to my old friend, and one withal so much my senior, 

 the stony eye with which the dry-fly purist in his 

 first decades of exaltation regarded the ' Chuck and 

 Chancer,' and the opprobrious names he called him. 



He has got steadily purer and drier ever since, to be 

 sure, but I think there is a better understanding now 

 between the two schools. It was upon the Avon, a 

 dozen miles away, in the vale of Pewsey, some thirty 



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