224 THE WAY OF A TROUT WITH A FLY 



dyke, which would have stopped me, but not him. It was 

 a breathless run, but I got below the fish in time, turned 

 him upstream again, and killed him when half-way home. 

 He scaled one pound fourteen ounces. 



I am driven to speculate whether the excitement of 

 these two incidents may not have been worth more than 

 the easier conquests of the earlier conditions. 



BOBBING REED. 



It is curious how the incidents of a day of a bumper 

 basket will often leave no special memory behind them 

 apart from the total of numbers or weight, while some 

 little incident in the taking, stalking, or losing of a single 

 fish, perhaps of no great size, on a day otherwise undis- 

 tinguished, will stay on in the memory and recur freshly 

 again and again after the lapse of years. Such a little 

 incident was the following : 



On a day in August some fifteen years gone I had fished 

 upstream with but modest success until about three o'clock, 

 when I arrived at a big red-brick bridge spanning my 

 chalk stream, standing below which on the right bank I 

 saw the current setting strongly against the pier on the 

 far side, carrying all flotsam swiftly along the brickwork 

 into the tumbling hurly-burly of the eddy below — an eddy 

 which was often the haunt of big trout; but they seldom 

 seemed to venture up under the bridge. 



For an hour or more not a dimple had marked the surface, 

 and I recalled my forgotten sandwiches and took my seat 

 upon a cattle fence commanding a view of the eddy and 

 the river under the span. Often on days following rain 

 I had heard the drip of water through the arch on to the 

 surface; but there had been a spell of drought, and this 

 was a dry day. So, when presently I heard a sound like 

 the fall of a drop of water on the surface, and presently 



