2O How to Fish for Salmon. 



cries the learned Pundit, with distended cheek and 

 corrugated brow ; a gaudy fly kills best here, and 

 a sober one there. I doubt this much ; and though 

 my experience in salmon fishing is not so extensive 

 as that of many others, yet I have killed fish in 

 different rivers with flies not bearing the remotest 

 resemblance to the standard fly of the water, not 

 only killed fish, but as many as any one. This is 

 not intended as a boast, but merely to show that 

 prejudice in angling is just like prejudice in any- 

 thing else, another phrase for want of reflection or 

 idleness of research." 



Quite true. Experience and observation go a 

 great way in making a successful angler. The 

 fishermen of certain rivers are often very pre- 

 judiced. In their experience they have seen that 

 certain flies, generally of their own making, are very 

 killing, that is to say, they have found them so, and 

 do not care for changing. Old Robertson was 

 mighty fond of the Gled Tail. " Aye, send me 

 some feathers of the gled, and I'll be muckle 

 obleeged to ye ! " I showed him a fly, one autumn 

 some years since, which had been most successful 

 in taking fish in a river I had been fishing, about 

 thirty miles from the Lochy. " Ah," he said with a 

 kind of sneer, " no good on this water." " Well," said 

 I, " I mean to try it." " Weel, yell soon change it." 

 We parted, he to fish the lower part of the beat 



