SPECIAL CONDITIONS— WET-FLY SOLUTIONS 37 



But at length there came a day when my first 

 timid experiments in the fishing of chalk streams 

 with the wet fly had proved encouraging enough 

 to lead to my having a small stock of wet-fly 

 patterns for chalk-stream fishing. It was a bad 

 sample of those days when the nerves of trout 

 seemed all on the jump, and I had fished from 

 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. without so much as a rise. It 

 was not that the fish were not rising. On the 

 contrary, they rose very well — not very much, 

 perhaps, but the best days are often those when 

 the rise is moderate. But this day every fish I cast 

 to went down at once, and too often I saw that 

 detestable torpedo wave, sometimes at the ap- 

 proach, and more frequently at the first cast. 



Soon after three I tied on a Tup's Indispensable 

 dressed on gut, and crawled carefully to within a 

 long cast of a trout which rose at infrequent 

 intervals in a narrow side-stream under the opposite 

 side. My line trailed on the water as I approached, 

 and I made the minimum of effort to dry the fly ere 

 I delivered it, so as to attract as httle attention as 

 possible to my movements. So it came about 

 that the fly, when it lit a yard or more to the left 

 of and above the trout — it was a bad cast as 

 regards direction — went immediately under. For 

 the nth time that day I saw that torpedo wave 

 as the fish darted through the shallow water. I 

 rose with a sigh, but as I did so my rod was a 

 hoop, and the reel screeched ; for the trout's dart 



