Flies and Hooks. 



CHAPTER V. 



FLIES AND HOOKS. 

 FLIES. 



HE who seeks to inform himself from books which are 

 the best flies for salmon-fishing, will hardly fail to find 

 food for serious thought on the value of human testimony. 



He will encounter almost as many opinions as there are 

 books treating on the subject, many of them as utterly 

 irreconcilable one with another as a tom-cat and a terrier. 



Perhaps the first advises a different fly for every change 

 of water, sky, or locality. No sooner has the reader 

 reconciled himself to buying at least a quart of flies, than 

 he finds another insisting that three varieties are all-suffi- 

 cient under all circumstances and conditions. He is natu- 

 rally, if unprepared, somewhat astonished. The question 

 seems to lie not within the realm of metaphysics, in which 

 difference of opinion is almost a matter of course, but to re- 

 late to mere records of, and deductions from, actual physi- 

 cal experiment. He seeks corroborative testimony, and 

 merely sinks deeper in the mire of uncertainty. He finds 

 some advocating gaudy flies, and others repudiating all 

 but those of sombre hue ; some insisting on the use of 

 light and bright flies in dark weather and heavy water, 

 and others claiming that this practice is all wrong and 

 that the true method is exactly the reverse, and so on. 



What is the matter ? These gentlemen are all men of 



