The Upright Angler 59 



his fish, or towards the place where his fish 

 had been feeding when he first observed it, 

 and putting himself in humiliating postures, 

 such as are effected by mere dry-fly purists 

 and others, he walked upright to the edge 

 of the stream. Then, and not till then, he 

 was wont to examine his line and his flies 

 and carefully disentangle them from any 

 knots into which they might have tied them- 

 selves ; because, as every one knows, fishing 

 lines and flies have a habit of getting horribly 

 mixed up just about the time when a good 

 trout is seen rising. 



These necessary preliminaries having been 

 fulfilled, our angler would indulge in a few 

 swishes, and end up by securely hooking 

 the opposite bank. It was irritating, no 

 doubt, but perhaps did not really make a very 

 great difference, seeing that the trout had by 

 that time in the vast majority of cases ceased 

 feeding for some reason or other. Indeed, 

 it may not have been a trout at all, but a 

 water-hen or a rat which caused the splash 

 that attracted this angler's attention. How 



