140 In Pursuit of the Trout 



from his notes, used several sunk flies on a 

 cast of not over-fine gut, and flogged away 

 up, down, or across stream on chance ! The 

 thing sounds like a nightmare to the dry-fly- 

 angler of the Test, Itchen, or Wye of 

 to-day ; yet that Colonel Hawker's accounts 

 are substantially true cannot fairly be doubted. 

 He appears, moreover, to have enjoyed as 

 remarkable sport at the end of the fifth 

 decade of the present century as he did 

 forty years earlier. In many stretches of 

 these Hampshire chalk streams trout are 

 to-day, in all probability, as plentiful and 

 certainly as large as they were in Colonel 

 Hawker's time ; but what an extraordinary 

 change has come over them ! To fish from 

 a phaeton would be to scare them well-nigh 

 out of their senses for an hour or more ; and 

 to fish with a cast of the comparatively 

 clumsy and ill-dressed flies of half or three- 

 quarters of a century ago would be to put 

 fish after fish off the rise. If you can ' set 

 down ' a rising trout by simply showing him 

 an inch too much gossamer gut, or a tiny 



