100 A SCOTTISH FLY-FISHER 



devices by which we endeavour to outwit him, there is 

 not involved much misdirected energy. Fishing, one 

 day, from the banks of a little brook, I was overtaken 

 by another fisherman who had come up the water be- 

 hind me. As anglers do, we fell into conversation, and 

 on comparing notes, I found that his basket held more 

 and larger fish than mine. I had been employing all 

 the art I knew, fishing fine and far — but not too far — 

 off and with flies so small and beautifully made that 

 even the craftiest of trout might have been excused for 

 confiding in the fraud, and curious to learn the secret 

 of his greater success, I asked permission to inspect his 

 tackle. The request was willingly complied with, and, 

 to the utter confusion of all my notions of the fitness of 

 things angling, I was shown a cast consisting of a few 

 feet of the coarsest gut, tied at short intervals in great, 

 clumsy knots — it resembled a rosary rather than any- 

 thing else — and terminating in a fly (No. 8 or 9, new 

 scale) composed of a tuft of human hair and the ex- 

 tremity of a blade of grass roughly bound to the hook 

 with a piece of white cotton thread. The monstrosity 

 was made in the image of nothing on earth or, within 

 my knowledge, elsewhere, and for what it had been 

 taken was beyond the hazard of a guess. That it had 

 been taken at all gave me food for thought. 



