OF PURFLING AND PURISM 57 



of the elect. So when my destiny did indeed 

 bring me to the side of the Darenth with a split 

 cane rod and a floating line (well greased, believe 

 me) and a little bottle of oil at my button and 

 a boxful of assorted duns and a season's permit in 

 my pocket, you may be sure that I was inclined 

 very scornfully to regard the unintelligent horde 

 who, with their clumsy casts of three, lash the 

 waters of the north country. I thought that I 

 had arrived. I had not. From the dizzy heights 

 to which I had mounted 1 looked backwards and 

 downwards to where the groundlings, whose com- 

 pany I had quitted for ever, plied their dull tasks, 

 and had never a thought, in my ignorance and 

 arrogance, for the cold, clear, distant peaks which 

 lay above my head, whose very existence I did 

 not suspect, to which I now know I shall never 

 climb. 



For though I have fished chalk-streams for 

 many years, I am still a bungler, and a bungler I 

 shall live and die. They say that there is always 

 room at the top. This is not the case. To attain 

 the highest in any abstract science, such as dry-fly 

 fishing can become, a man must be made of rarer 

 clay than mine. There is in my nature an ineradi- 

 cable thirst for the death of fishes which shall 

 for ever exclude me from the company of 



