PSYCHOLOGICAL 193 



ward made them instinctively handy men. And since the 

 greatest satisfactions of life are to be found in the perfect 

 performance of function, the faculty of handiness, whether 

 in sailor, surgeon, or artist, turns the possessor instinctively 

 to the sport in which the quality finds its finest oppor- 

 tunities of exposition — the sport of fishing with the fly. 

 Watch a company of anglers at the billiard table, and it 

 will be long odds that those with the most sensitive hands, 

 with that quality of touch which makes for scoring, will 

 also be the best fly fishermen. 



It is the quality of hands which enables a man with the 

 shabbiest and most hopeless equipment to make a show 

 of the man whose hopes are built merely on perfection of 

 rods and gear. Wise indeed was George Selwyn Marryat 

 when he said: "It's not the fly; it's the driver." It would 

 seem as if there could be no difference between the way 

 a fly presented by A. and an exact replica presented by 

 B. floats down dry over a fish when once it has lit upon 

 the water. Yet there is some quality in some men which 

 seems to make the fly at the end of their line exercise a 

 provocative fascination over trout which the average 

 performer fails to achieve. The most conspicuous example 

 of this which I ever came across was a Frenchman, with 

 whom I spent a couple of days on a Norman chalk stream 

 during the May-fly season. There was a very hard-fished 

 hundred yards of right bank in part of the water, with a 

 good trout in every little bay. My French friend courte- 

 ously gave me the pas, and I tried fish after fish, seven or 

 eight in all, I think. I was not conscious of fishing badly, 

 and I put none of these fish down, but I got no rise from 

 any one of them; but no sooner — when I stood aside to 

 let him cast to them — did his fly (the same pattern as 

 mine) drift down over a fish than it rose to it almost as 

 a matter of course. I could see no practical difference in 



25 



