CHOICE OF PATTERN 93 



pale watery spinners respectively in the new patterns, 

 but the only representative of these among the old 

 standards is the jenny spinner. 



Smuts or curses are sometimes to be seen in good 

 numbers even in April, but 

 Smuts. it is towards the middle of 



' May that they may be con- 



fidently expected, and during fine or close weather 

 are usually present throughout the summer. In olden 

 times the angler generally lost his temper over smut- 

 ting fish and, I believe, attached undue importance 

 to the size of the artificials to be used. Some went 

 so far as to get hooks made specially of extraordinarily 

 fine wire and altogether very diminutive. The 000 

 hook was not small enough for their ideas, and some 

 of the hooks made for them were marked 0000 or 

 even 00000. 



The description of smutting fish in a subsequent 

 chapter will indicate that they are feeding and moving 

 about under conditions likely to make them super- 

 naturally shy and wary. If one of the large ones 

 did fasten to a 000 or smaller hook it too often 

 happened that the hold gave and the fish escaped. 

 This occurred so frequently that I decided to abandon 

 anything smaller than the 00 hook. Of late years 

 I have seldom failed to score off fish taking these 

 irritating little Diptera with Nos. 26 and 27, the male 

 and female black gnat in the new patterns — my prefer- 

 ence being for the male. One of the best dry-fly 

 men of the day, Mr. E. Valentine Corrie, has pro- 



