OF THE BEGINNING OF THINGS 7 



I could not believe that the habits of the trout 

 were so changed as to make this impossible, and I 

 began to look for opportunities to experiment. 

 The bulging trout presented the most obvious 

 case, yet it was rather by a chain of circumstance 

 than by the straightforward reasoning which now 

 seems so simple and obvious that I was led into 

 experiments along this line. 



How I effected some sort of solution of the 

 problem with a variant of Greenwell's Glory, and 

 later on with Tup's Indispensable, is detailed 

 elsewhere, as also are my experiments with the 

 trout of glassy glides (who seldom break the 

 surface to take a winged insect, presumably be- 

 cause of the drag), together with other fumblingsin 

 the search of truth ; but from that time forth I 

 have seldom neglected an opportunity to test the 

 wet fly on chalk-stream trout. It may be that 

 on many occasions I have used the wet fly when 

 the dry would have been more lucrative. On the 

 other hand, I have found it furnish me with sport 

 on occasions and in places when and where the 

 dry fly offered no encouragement, nor any prospect 

 of aught but casual and fluky success, and I have 

 proA^ded myself with a method which forms an 

 admirable supplement to the dry fly, and has 

 frequently given me a good basket in apparently 

 hopeless conditions, and in the smoothest of 

 water and the brightest of weather. 



