FISHING. 
SALMON AND TROUT. 
ON HOOKS, TACKLE, AND FISHING GEAR. 
‘Ars est celare artem.’ 
THE saying goes ‘A good workman never finds fault with his 
tools,’ but if by this it be meant that he can work as well with 
bad tools as with good, or produce equally satisfactory results, 
then it says little for the sagacity of those who made the 
proverb. It is specially in the more artistic descriptions of 
work that the importance of good tools is apparent. The fly- 
fisher is a workman in a highly artistic school, and, if he is 
to do his work thoroughly well, his tools, that is, his tackle— 
rods, hooks, lines, &c. &cc.—must be of the very best. 
There are still some ‘happy hunting grounds’ scattered 
throughout the British Islands on which ‘the shadow of the 
rod or glitter of the bait’ has but seldom fallen,—small 
mountain lochs and moorland streams wherein fish are so 
guileless and simple in their habits that they will rise with 
delightful confidingness at the most rudimentary specimen of 
the artificial fly, offered to them in the least attractive manner. 
Such spots I have met with where it took weeks to impress 
upon its trout the melancholy fact that ‘men were deceivers 
ever,’ and where day after day the veriest bungler might fill his 
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