THE DEVONSHIRE AVON 



water meadow behind you, and you must present the 

 dry fly in becoming attitude, properly cocked, and 

 all the rest of it. 



It does not so much matter how you present the 

 wet fly. You have got to get it there through diffi- 

 culties, above and around. And you must also know 

 where to make the effort, and when it is worth while to 

 run risks, commensurate with your skill, of hanging 

 up your flies. These things are outside description, 

 nor can the ' smittle ' spots upon a river's surface be 

 chronicled, for experience alone, which becomes a 

 second instinct, can read such lessons. Ingenuous 

 fools have written of wet-fly fishing as an operation 

 conducted on ' chuck-and-chance-it ' principles. Pos- 

 sibly they refer to fishing a lake from a boat. Let us 

 hope so ! Nor is the phrase wholly amiss as applied 

 to ' salmon-fishing ' for trout down a big river. But 

 in connection with up-stream fishing, and above all, 

 in such a river as this is, it is a deplorable exposure of 

 innocence. Let the man who can throw a decent 

 fly, and has nevertheless such callow conceptions 

 of wet-fly fishing, try his hand against some habitual 

 exponent of it ! How shifting, too, according to 

 weather and conditions, are the sort of places where 

 the trout are feeding. It may sometimes take an hour 

 or so to discover that some strange whim, as it would 

 incorrectly seem to us in our ignorance, has seized 

 upon the whole river, and that every fish is, as it were, 

 out of place ! 



The strangest case of this within my own experience 

 occurred on the Welsh Dee ; not on the rugged 

 reaches we traversed in a former chapter, but in the 

 p 225 



