42 THE WAY OF A TROUT WITH A FLY 



the other over a hare's-ear body, get a rusty brown effect ! 

 They also knew the value of an admixture of seal's fur or 

 mohair in the body, in throwing up and affecting the colour- 

 ing of the hackle. And I cannot help thinking that the 

 rage for quills sacrifices a great deal that was of value — 

 and still would be — in the dubbed body of the trout fly. 



A small spent spinner — one of the then new Halford 

 patterns — dropped on the surface showed nothing whatever, 

 except an extremely black and obvious hook, duplicated 

 by reflection, breaking through the surface in a tiny patch 

 of blurred and broken light, due, no doubt, to the hackles ; 

 and when viewed in the rainbow semi-circle one could not 

 candidly say that it looked (apart from the hackles) at all 

 fly-like, or anything but dense and hard against the light. 

 But my friend told me that when the spinner was floating 

 less high on its hackles, and was in fact somewhat water- 

 logged, it looked very fly-like and attractive. A home- 

 made Tup's Indispensable, tried next, had a distinct 

 advantage over the spinner when floating. Sunk, it 

 presented quite a nymph-like appearance, and it was quite 

 comprehensible that a trout might come some way to 

 fetch it. The same might be said of some seal's-fur- 

 bodied nymphs which we also tried. In a dull, shabby 

 way they had a lot of translucency. We next tried to 

 fathom why a Greenwell's Glory, fished wet, should be 

 taken at all below the surface. As my companion said, 

 it was " a fine representation of a Greenwell's Glory," and 

 on the surface it might have passed as a rather shabby 

 olive. Under water it went down always with its narrow 

 wings upright, and it may be that it is taken because the 

 trout is too foolish to realize that it is not on the surface. 

 Much the same might be said of a small dotterel hackle, 

 tied Stewart- wise, with waxed primrose silk on a No. oo 

 hook. It might have been taken for a hatching nymph 



