24 A SCOTTISH FLY-FISHER 



responsible for their failures ; for a full creel they are 

 indebted to their own art. 



But the angler's greeting involves a misconception. 

 To the thought it conveys there is no corresponding 

 reality. It embodies the conviction that slight and 

 isolated incidents, incidents occurring spasmodically 

 and not to be foreseen, are mere casual happenings 

 independent of causation. We conceive them as un- 

 related to anything by which they have been preceded. 

 We call them matters of chance, and dismiss them as 

 incapable of explanation. In enabling us to give 

 expression to our sense of the haphazard character of 

 nature's methods, the words chance, fortune, luck, serve 

 a necessary purpose, and may not be dispensed with — 

 even by those who deny the existence of the thing they 

 signify, and on whose lips they are merely an admission 

 of impotence to trace the hidden causes of events. 



'Tis not in the angler to command success. There's 

 a Divinity that shapes his ends contrive them how he 

 may. He is in the hands of Fate. His results are 

 determined before he has cast a fly on the water ; were 

 determined, indeed, at that vague period, the Beginning. 

 His predestined victims are awaiting him ; he will find 

 them without fail in the place and at the hour appointed. 

 Of the disappointments in front of him, he has no 



