214 THE WAY OF A TROUT WITH A FLY 



picious enough to drag in a tiny fly, are peculiarly amenable 

 to the seduction of a large fly corresponding generally to 

 some trichopterous type. This the native fishermen — both 

 numerous and keen — know well; and, as a result, every 

 good fish who haunts the open has every evening during 

 the summer one team at least of large flies, more or less 

 sedgy in character, drawn across his nose, and Sunday 

 gives him even larger opportunities. Thus it comes that 

 the stock of large trout feeding in the open is early weeded 

 out, or driven to safer quarters under umbrageous boughs 

 or tangles of thorn or roots, or in deep pockets among 

 lily pads or water-weed. It is here that the wandering 

 angler who has learned to drift a fly close under the oppo- 

 site bank, or to float it down a narrow runnel in the grasses, 

 makes his account, and has such an enormous advantage 

 over the native sportsman. He, poor man, with a cast 

 that must last him one, two, or even three seasons, cannot 

 afford to risk flies or tackle by casting among the boughs, 

 and his team of three or four flies would soon be in diffi- 

 culties if he attempted to extract the big trout from their 

 weedy fastnesses. Yet it is wonderful what he will do 

 with his primitive tackle. We have seen a rustic angler 

 with ten or eleven feet of hazel, tipped with an umbrella 

 rib from one of Fox's " Paragon " frames, laying his 

 coarse lures and heavy line with exquisite neatness and 

 accuracy across eighteen or twenty yards of water. In 

 the days when the May fly is coming on he makes much 

 hay of the foible of his trout for a large dragged fly, and 

 with a white May fly with a brown cork body and a ginger 

 hackle he will at times fill portentous baskets when your 

 dry-fly expert's creel is comparatively empty. One gets 

 lessons that it is not perfection of rod or tackle that makes 

 the fly fisherman. Once in June, 1909, it befell the 

 Englander to have his fly rod disabled in the course of a 



