90 AN ANGLER AT LARGE 



of the trout's habits is much larger than that 

 of his self-constituted superior. He forgets that 

 if the two of them (grant me two fishermen 

 of a sort of hypothetical, mathematically ab- 

 stract character, each knowing nothing of his 

 rival's methods) are placed on the banks of an 

 unknown fast stream, that knowledge will enable 

 him to give the dry-fly man first fishing over 

 every pool and run, and that, after the dry-fly 

 man has laboriously and vainly flogged every inch 

 of the water, he (the wet-fly man) can come along 

 and take a brace or more in a dozen casts, placed 

 deftly in the twelve spots where, from the condi- 

 tion of the water, the state of the weather, the 

 season of the year, and a hundred other things 

 about which the dry-fly man knows nothing at all, 

 he suspects the good fish are lying. He forgets 

 similarly that, placed on the banks of an unknown 

 chalk-stream, he and the dry-fly man are reduced 

 to an equality in that a rise, breaking the surface 

 of the water, speaks to both of them with the 

 same sound, and that a fish lying in mid-stream 

 is equally visible to both of them. He does not 

 realise that a knowledge of the fishes' habits is 

 (I speak comparatively) practically no part of a 

 dry-fly angler's equipment. The mere fact that on 

 a chalk-stream he can jettison the best part of the 

 lore which it has taken him many years to acquire 



