SUNDRY OBSERVATIONS 143 



whether, with his special dry-fly equipment, Mr. F. M. 

 Halford often made the whole-hearted experiments essential 

 to bring this comparison to a real test. 



He never believed the wet fly on a chalk stream would 

 pay, and in his autobiography, published in 1903, he gives 

 an account of a week's fishing of the Test by a very skilled 

 Yorkshire angler of my acquaintance, which leads him to 

 the same conclusion. Here it is: 



'* I was much interested, some years since, watching a 

 first-rate wet-fly man, a Yorkshire fisherman, on a portion 

 of the Upper Test. His flies were Olive Quills of various 

 shades, Iron blues, Red Quills, and such patterns, all of 

 which he used on his native streams, and were dressed 

 with peacock quill bodies, very meagre upright wings, and 

 a single turn of hen hackle for legs. He did not in any 

 way practise the ' chuck-and-chance-it plan,' but moved 

 slowly upstream, carefully studying the set of the current, 

 and quickly deciding where a feeding fish should be in each 

 run. Sometimes it would be close under the bank, some- 

 times on the edge of a slack place, and sometimes on the 

 margin of an eddy. 



" Whenever he had made up his mind as to the most 

 likely place, there he would make one, or at most two, light 

 casts, placing his fly with great accuracy and letting it 

 drift down without drag. Now this, I take it, was the 

 best possible imitation of the work of a dry-fly fisherman, 

 except that he had not spotted the fish and his fly was not 

 floating in the dry-fly sense. His patterns were very 

 similar in size, colour, and form to those of the ordinary 

 chalk-stream fisherman. He used very fine drawn gut, and 

 worked hard from morning to evening, never passing over 

 a likely place without putting a fly into it, and very seldom 

 losing a hooked fish. 



" It was in the early part of April, during strong westerly 



