104 THE TROUT ARE RISING 
So far, I must confess that, though I had 
occasionally employed the dry fly when necessary, 
the wet fly had appealed to me more and I re- 
garded myself as first and foremost a wet-fly man. 
But now I began to feel the genuine dry-fly 
enthusiasm, though far be it from me to institute 
comparisons or to dogmatize as to preferences. 
On this point two golden sentences from that 
charming and highly educative book Lord Grey’s 
“Fly Fishing” may appropriately be quoted. 
“T have,” he says, “at various times started in 
my own mind so many theories which have been 
suggested by experience and afterwards upset by 
it, that I do not desire to press anyone to accept 
an opinion unless there is anything in his own 
experience which goes to support it. There is 
only one theory about angling in which I have 
perfect confidence, and that is that the two words, 
least appropriate to any statement about it, are 
the words ‘ always’ and ‘never ’,” 
Touching dry-fly fishing, he sums up the art 
in these words: ‘The effort, in short, is to 
make the trout notice the fly without noticing 
anything else. It is in this that the fine art of 
dry-fly fishing consists.” Obviously the same 
principle applies to grayling, though of the two 
fish the grayling is far the less shy. 
The time the visitor from Stroud and I had 
together by the waterside that day, from early 
forenoon until 4 o’clock, had its sparkling interval. 
During those days the wise thing was to be at the 
waterside soon after breakfast. Early in autumn 
