272 SALMON AND TROUT. 
years ago when I drove over from Hull to enjoy a day’s fishing 
and dine with the club in the evening, which in those days 
meant half-past six. I did the twenty-three miles in two hours 
and a half, and before eight o’clock had stabled my horse at 
the ‘ Bell’—a cheerful, cosy inn, which I am happy to add still 
flourishes, for the comfort of anglers, in the old country style. 
Early as I was, however, the sun was yet earlier, and by the 
time I had disposed of a substantial breakfast the day was 
already sultry without the faintest promise of a cloud or breeze. 
Having exchanged greetings and predictions of empty creels 
with two or three members of the club who had slept at the 
inn and were just making their first appearance, I strolled into 
Dobson’s for two or three special flies, and then started for the 
King’s Mill beck—the uppermost and liveliest reach of water 
near the town. Here, however, I found myself forestalled, and 
fishing in the wake of an angler who ‘scatter’d tumult and 
affray’ along the stream by a lavish exhibition of his person. 
Nothing went right, and at noon I found myself at Sunderland 
Wick bridge, with a brace only of fish in my creel, surrounded 
by still waters and with a blazing sun overhead. No look-out 
could well be worse. But as I gazed up the beck I caught a 
gleam of hope. Some thirty yards above the bridge a still 
back-water joined the main stream, and over the junction 
drooped a large willow. I missed the tree last year and 
lamented it as Cowper did his felled poplars. But it was 
then full of life and leaf, and just outside the sweep of its 
boughs a legion of gnats were playing. Yes! there was a rise 
—and there another—and anon three or four snouts came to 
the surface at once. In another minute I was lying on my face 
by the sedgy bank within a long shot of the enemy, my rod 
held low, while my single fly, a small black gnat, wavered in 
the stream far below me. I lay low, like Brer Fox, till I felt 
sure that the trout had not taken the alarm, and then on the 
first ruffling of the water by several consecutive rises dropped 
my fly with a long horizontal cast just behind the willow. That 
moment I was fast in a good fish, which I worked steadily 
