140 GOLDEN DAYS 



always expect and so rarely witness. 

 There was a good hatch of fly up, and as 

 each sailed down the ripple it met a noise- 

 less and unrelenting fate, the clean head 

 and tail rise of a feeding trout. I had 

 been fishing for an hour past, and had lost 

 three flies and three good fish. Failure 

 loomed irretrievable ; a succession of 

 catastrophes. In each case the same 

 thing had happened. A rising fish had 

 been marked down between two walls of 

 weed in a long amber stickle. He had 

 been stalked to within easy casting dis- 

 tance ; he had taken the fly perfectly, but 

 on feeling the draw home of the steel had 

 rushed madly up-stream, and eventually 

 bolted for the weed-bed. Once there he 

 could so arrange matters that he, and not 

 the rod, settled how much strain the line 

 could bear. Gradually he burroM^ed 

 deeper and deeper in the weeds, and soon 

 there came that extra ounce of strain, and 

 I wound up my reel disconsolate. 



Then it was that Jean Pierre proposed 

 a better way. We tried it. We stalked 

 another fish a few yards higher up. As 

 the fly sailed past him he rose and fastened, 



