ON TROTJTIKG, TEOUT PLIES, ETC. 93 



hour, whatever state the water may be in. Nature 

 does not work in the vulgar manner of making 

 larger flies for flooded waters, and finer and lesser 

 ones for the low and clear. 



With regard to certain states of water (dark or 

 clear), and the colour of the fly showing more soher 

 or bright, as the shades of light may strike and 

 tinge it for the time being, we should not stand too 

 stiffly upon a crotchet of opinion. We may find 

 success though we cannot well account for it, and 

 therefore our imitations should perhaps not be held 

 too strictly opinionative, either in point of size or 

 colour. We therefore may not err in sometimes 

 holding our fly a size larger,* or a shade lighter 



* This must, we think, have been an idea, not an experience of 

 Younger's, otherwise he would likely have written more decidedly. 

 He also elsewhere recommends a spring fly to be dressed larger than 

 the fly imitated ; but the summer months are not, in our opinion, 

 favourable for angling with flies so made. The rivers are larger in 

 March and April than in summer, and the feeding trouts also lie in 

 deeper water, and are ever hungry and extraordinarily fond of flies 

 in early spring ; and the large fly may, trom these circumstances, be 

 more easily seen, and readily taken. But unless in early spring, or 

 in water still very dark or muddy from a recent flood, we never 

 knew an angler who preferred fishing with flies made larger than the 

 natural insect. If different at all, and for clear-water fishing, most 

 anglers like the dressed fly a trifle smaller than the living one ; and 

 we, ourselves, have many a time found a fly made up on this prin- 

 ciple a good killer. In the streaming rippling waters, generally 

 fished with fly in summer, the small hook cannot so readily show 

 the cheat. The males of some of the kinds of water-flies are smaller 

 than the females, and the difference is nowhere more noticeable than 



