50 SALMON AND TROUT. 
fishing with three flies and a double-handed rod, an extra foot 
-—making, say, ten feet in all—is sometimes added, but it may 
be safely said that fifty 3-yard casting lines are made for one 
over that length. Where eyed flies are used, which have of 
course no separate link of gut belonging to them, the casting 
line becomes practically a link shorter. 
I rarely myself use more than two flies in trout or any other 
fishing—except occasionally when experimenting on the best 
flies for a new water—and therefore three yards is an ample 
allowance. Not that, as ‘Box and Cox’ expresses it, I have any 
‘violent animosity or rooted antipathy’ to three flies, but that 
for ordinary purposes I find two preferable. Two flies can be 
cast better than three ; two flies can be ‘worked’ better than 
three ; two flies are not so liable to entanglements as three ; 
and when they do get ‘mixed’ the tangle is less inextricable. 
By ‘working better,’ what I mean is that whilst the upper 
dropper, which, a second or two after the cast, hangs—or should 
hang—clear of the line, and, barring the fly, nearly clear of the 
water also,—and whilst the tail fly is of course always swimming 
clear, the lower or second dropper, by the action of drawing in the 
flies, gets of necessity more or less muddled up with the casting 
line (which the nose of a rising fish is very likely to strike), and 
cannot be worked, like the top dropper, cross-line or ‘otter’ 
fashion, dribbling along, that is, amongst the ripples. 
The argument applies also to river fishing, though perhaps 
in a somewhat less degree inasmuch as the action of a current 
—often nearly smooth—does not lend itself so readily to the 
artistic working of the dropper as the streamless and generally 
wind-wrinkled surface of a lake. 
All this, however, is fairly a question of practice as well as 
theory, and, as I say, many excellent fly-fishers—perhaps a 
majority—prefer three flies to two. Their contention is that it 
gives a greater chance of the flies being seen, and a greater 
choice to the fish when he does see them. 
Passing from the gut to the reel, or running line, I find so 
