56 SALMON AND TROUT. 
REELS AND REEL FASTENINGS. 
The Fisheries Exhibition of 1883 was prolific in new reels, 
many of which, it must be confessed, were not only highly 
ingenious as inventions, but really excellent in their adaptation 
to different sorts of fishing. Indeed, if reels have not in the 
matter of ‘improvement’ quite kept pace with the improve- 
ments in rods, they are yet prodigiously in advance of the 
unmechanical windlasses with which our forbears, in the not 
very distant past, were content to reel in the victims of their 
prowess. But I will not slay the slain twice over, or evoke, 
merely for the purpose of exorcising them, the ghosts of 
‘Pirns,’ ‘ winch-winders,’ ‘multipliers’ (Aorresco referens /) and 
other similar abominations, which if not actually as extinct as 
the dodo, soon will be. . . 
Of modernised improved reels or winches that which 
presents, perhaps, the greatest actual novelty is Slater’s ‘Com- 
bination Reel,’ so called because uniting the qualifications of 
a Nottingham reel and an ordinary plain or check reel. This 
it does without, so far as I can judge, diminishing the effi- 
ciency of either. Further—speaking with due diffidence of a 
speciality of fishing which I have had very little opportunity, 
or perhaps taste, for acquiring—it would appear to be vastly 
superior to the old-fashioned open Nottingham reel, in that, 
being confined to the barrel by transverse bars, the line can- 
not be perpetually ‘winding off’—or I should say ‘twisting 
off’—the reel when not wanted, and hitching its loose coils 
round the reel itself and everything else in its vicinity. 
Nottingham fishing apart, however, the reel is of very 
general applicability, and being exceptionally light, as well as 
simple in construction, presents advantages in many directions. 
For all kinds of fishing, for example, in which the bait is 
commonly, or occasionally ‘cast from the reel,’ it is excellent. 
So also it is in some branches of fly-fishing, such as (to mention 
one in which I have used it with much satisfaction) in lake 
