180 THE VALLEY OF ENCHANTMENT 



Frenchmen in forty minutes at Salamanca, so, I felt, 

 might laurels be won, or at least a fish landed, in half 

 an hour. Presently the cock-nosed skiiF bore me dancing 

 over the waves ; the boatman bid me cast into a rattling 

 stream and bring the fly round into the comparative calm. 

 I did so until six times; the seventh, or thereby, there 

 was a slight commotion behind the Bulldog — so slight 

 as might have escaped attention in the tumult, had I not 

 caught sight of a fin above the surface, and felt a tiny 

 twitch on the line. Nothing more. That fish may have 

 been the 40-pounder in quest of which I have vainly 

 squandered so many days, or he may have been but an 

 impertinent grilse of 5 lb. A couple of inches of fin 

 thirty yards away afford a very slender basis for com- 

 putation. Vain were all attempts to wheedle him into a 

 closer intimacy ; a sunk fly and a jiggihg one, a fast fly 

 and a slow one, all proved ineffective, and we floated on. 

 Twenty yards lower down the line suddenly stopped ; up 

 went the rod, and I was fast in something solid. A rock ? 

 no, a delicious wobble gave assurance that the obstacle 

 was alive, and presently the reel began to revolve, slowly 

 at first — more swiftly — wildly at last, as the fish tore 

 away to the distant shore. My reel held a hundred and 

 twenty yards of trusty line, but, as I stepped out of the 

 boat, there was parlously little left upon the drum. Once 

 ashore, however, I could exert the utmost pressure. It is 

 not always present to the angler's mind what that utmost 

 amounts to. Good treble gut will stand a strain, say, of 

 8 or 10 lb. Pulling with a rod of eighteen feet, held at 

 an angle of forty-five degrees, you cannot break such gut. 

 How then does it happen that such gut sometimes is 

 broken by a fish ? Indubitably because one of two things 



