VII 

 PSYCHOLOGICAL 



HANDS. 



One of the most enviable of the qualities which go to 

 make up the first-rate fly fisherman is that which, in con- 

 nection with horsemanship, whether in riding or driving, 

 is known as " hands," the combined certainty and delicacy 

 of correspondence between wrist and eye which mean so 

 much, whether in the despatch of the tiny feathered iron 

 to its coveted quarry, or in the skilful restraint of that 

 quarry when hooked, and its ultimate steering to the net. 

 After all, certainty and delicacy are correlatives — dual 

 manifestations of the same confident power. It is, I 

 believe, the truth that the finest handloom weavers are 

 invariably big, powerful men, with their nerves in fine 

 order, and that for fineness and delicacy their work far 

 excels that of women. Anyone turning over Who's Who, 

 and picking out those whose recreation is angling, will 

 probably be surprised to see what a large proportion of 

 these classes comes within the fraternity of fly fisherman — 

 sailors, surgeons, and artists — all of them men of their 

 hands, though those hands may differ in type, and there 

 seems little in common between the long taper fingers of 

 the artist and the skilled mechanic type of hand common 

 among great surgeons and dentists. Probably it would 

 be impossible to classify the hands of the sailor man in this 

 way, but the tendency of quality which drove them sea- 



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