150 THE WAY OF A TROUT WITH A FLY 



enough, inasmuch as the phenomenon of surface drag is 

 peculiar to the dry fly, and the under-water movement 

 of a wet fly may be attributed by the fish to the volition 

 of a live insect, whereas the draw of the gut on the surface 

 is an open betrayal of the guile. It is true that the opinion 

 used to be expressed by dry-fly anglers of immense experi- 

 ence and authority that the use of the wet fly on chalk 

 streams tends to make the trout shy more rapidly than does 

 the use of the dry fly; but I confess I have seen no facts 

 put forward to base such an opinion, and, indeed, the use 

 of the wet fly upon chalk streams was for years, until com- 

 paratively recently, so much of a dead letter that it is hard 

 to see whence these anglers have obtained the data to 

 justify such a pronouncement. Certainly neither the rods 

 nor flies used on the first-class dry-fly streams were until 

 recently in the least suitable to wet-fly practice, and they 

 are by no means universally so yet. On the other hand, the 

 experience of the hard-fished Scottish border streams, such 

 as the Tweed, tends to show that the persistent use of the 

 wet fly is nothing like so pernicious in its effect upon trout 

 as an even less constant and persistent application of the 

 dry fly. My own experience of chalk streams — much 

 less extensive, it is true, than that of the authorities re- 

 ferred to, but directed with some persistence to this in- 

 vestigation — points the same way. The dry-fly authority 

 rightly insists that in his angling the true sportsman should 

 abstain from adding needlessly to the already too advanced 

 education of our chalk-stream trout, and thus prejudicing 

 the chances of sport for the brother anglers who will follow 

 him on the water. But when he goes on to insist that this 

 proposition involves a restriction to the use of dry fly only, 

 I venture to think that the logic of this deduction is faulty. 

 The deduction should be that the chalk-stream angler should 

 not cast his fly without some reasonable hope of attracting 



