284 SALMON AND TROUT. 
luck to use it occasionally when the natural insect was strong 
on the water, and it was taken in preference to anything else. 
I may add that the heaviest take of large trout which ever came 
to my knowledge—though, alas! I was not the captor—was 
made with this fly on the upper waters of Foston Beck, now in 
the hands of Colonel St. Quentin. 
I might fairly rest my case on these two instances, in which 
the peculiarities of the natural insect during one brief phase of 
its existence are reproduced with such effect in the artificial fly. 
But I cannot pass by the ‘local value ’—to borrow an artist’s 
phrase—of certain flies tied in imitation of insects unknown 
beyond a limited district. Every Devonshire man knows the 
virtues of the ‘blue upright’—a dusky, smooth-bodied fly, 
varying from pale slate colour to a dead black. It holds, in 
fact, on Devonian streams much the same place as the mur- 
derous ‘blue dun’ with its downy body in a great majority of 
our English counties. Now on my first introduction to a 
Devonshire stream I noticed great numbers of a slender, active 
insect which had no representative in my fly book, and which I 
felt sure I had never seen before. But a local artist soon sup- 
plied me with the imitation I wanted, and since that time I 
have killed more trout in Devon with the ‘blue upright’ than 
with any other fly, and have seen the natural insect on every 
stream I have fished in that land of brooks. Surely this is 
more than a mere coincidence. 
All this is so obvious, that my readers may ask how anyone 
could ever propose to question it? Yet in defence of the 
Scottish ‘ nondescriptarians’ it should be said that they can tell 
of experiences much at variance with those on which I have 
built my inference. I have fished in some forty Scotch lochs 
or tarns, rarely without fair success, sometimes with brilliant 
results ; yet where the Sa/mo farto alone is in question, I have 
but half a dozen flies on my list for active service. Of these 
half-dozen two only, and those by no means the best, resemble 
any natural fly with which I am acquainted. I do not pretend 
to explain this fact, nor what mysterious harmony between a 
