OF MAcARTHUR 91 



without doing his chances of sport any harm what- 

 ever, should cause the wet-fly man to think better 

 of himself. But he does not know this. Again, 

 he does not realise that the dry-fly man owes half 

 his vaunted accuracy of casting to the rod-maker 

 and the line-spinner, and that in this particular 

 also they are pretty much on a level (it is under- 

 stood again that I speak of the skilful of both 

 schools). He does not realise that to be the dry- 

 fly man's equal, if not superior, he has only to 

 buy a certain kind of apparatus, to learn not 

 to work his fly, to avoid drag, to pull in his slack 

 and to distinguish between a number of unfamiliar 

 artificial patterns all matters surely within his 

 competence. 



No, he accepts the estimate which the world, 

 taught by the dry-fly man, has formed of his 

 attainments, and until he has tried a chalk-stream 

 for himself, imagines that he might as well fish 

 in his mother's pail as in the Test. He is all 

 wrong, and here is an incident to encourage him. 



In the early part of this century a man, whom I 

 will call MacArthur, came upon me out of the 

 East, demanding a chalk-stream and instruction 

 in the dry-fly business. As he made it already 

 understood that he was to pay for the chalk- 

 stream, I undertook to introduce him to a water 

 which I had fished during the five previous 



