THE MAY FLY 163 



often get capital sport with the artificial May fly. Of course 

 if the day be blustrous and rough his chance is all the better, 

 but even on a calm day if he can manage to keep his fly floating 

 on the top he may take a good many fish. For this purpose 

 it is of course imperatively necessary to fish with a dry fly, 

 and between every cast the angler will have to make several 

 false casts, or casts in which the fly does not touch the water, 

 to shake the wet from the fly and to get it as dry as possible.* 

 To make the fly float has been the great desideratum with 

 fly dressers. The floating May flies of Mr. Ogden, one of the 

 best dressers of trout flies in England, have been widely 

 circulated, and they are, as are all his trout flies, beautiful 

 specimens of skill and neatness. They certainly do attract a 

 great number of fish to rise, and when the fish run large so 

 that in opening their mouths they take the whole fly in a 

 gulp they are most valuable flies, but where the trout are 

 small, as half or three-quarter pounders, there is this objection 

 to them they are so bushy that when a small trout attempts 

 to seize them he is very apt to run his nose against some of the 

 feathers which stand out from the fly and to drive the hook 

 before him instead of seizing it in his mouth, and thus the fish 

 is often missed and scared entirely, when he really rises fairly 

 to the fly. Their floating capabilities are undeniably excellent ; 

 when they get thoroughly wet, however, they take some time 

 to dry. The angler, in using Mr. Ogden's green drakes, should 

 therefore have two or three ready at the same time, so that 

 one may dry while the other is fishing ; with respect to the 

 dressing of the fly, it must be borne in mind that the colours 

 and size of many flies vary much in different waters, so much 

 so, that they might almost be supposed to belong to different 

 species, f 



The bodies of May flies have been dressed of all kinds of 

 materials India-rubber, crewel, silk, quill, goldbeater's skin, 

 plain gut, stained gut, cork, etc. I shall give two or three bodies 

 which I think are the best. The simplest is of buff or ginger- 

 coloured crewel or silk ribbed with brown silk. At the tail 



* This irksome process is quite unnecessary if the fly has been dipped 

 in parafin the day before and the oil allowed to dry, which renders it quite 

 waterproof. ED. 



f In 1897, as an experiment on the colour sense of fish, I had some May- 

 flies dyed bright scarlet and sky-blue. On 2nd June I landed thirty-one 

 trout and two chub in the Gade at Cassiobury with these unorthodox flies. 

 Only one of these trout weighed less than i Ib. On 5th June, using similar 

 flies, I landed eleven trout in the Beane at Woodhall Park, Hertford. I kept 

 four brace of these fish weighing i6| Ib. ED. 



