374 SALMON AND TROUT. 
Use the horizontal cast wherever possible, and at the first 
attempt place the fly, quite dry and cocked, lightly on the 
water so that it will float down over the feeding-place of your 
fish accurately and without drag. If you succeed in rising 
your fish, strike from the reel—that is, without holding the 
line in any way ; remember it requires very little force to drive 
the barb of the hook home, and any excess is worse than 
useless. While playing your fish, keep on taking him down 
stream so as to drown him as quickly as possible, and at the 
same time take him away from his lair, where every impedi- 
ment by the assistance of which he is likely to break you is 
well known to him. Do not attempt to net your fish until 
he is exhausted ; the best indication of this is that he turns on 
his side on top of the water. More big fish are lost by prema- 
ture attempts at netting than from any other cause. Sink the 
net deep and draw him over it, then gently raise the net and 
draw him ashore, but do not attempt to lift him out at arm’s 
length. If sizeable, give him his guzetus with one smart blow 
at the summit of the spinal column ; if undersized, return hin. 
gently to the water. 
If you cannot succeed in rising your fish, and determine to 
seek for one feeding elsewhere, retire from the water with the 
same caution you exercised when approaching ; still keep well 
down, crouching or kneeling ; again remember to move during 
a puff of wind and wait during the calm intervals, and altogether 
be most careful not to show yourself and thus make him still 
shyer than he is already, and this as much for the sake of the 
next fisherman who may try him as for your own. Note par- 
ticularly that at all times when moving, whether crawling up to 
the water or beating a retreat from it, the slower and more 
deliberate the motion, the less likely you are to scare the fish. 
Every one of the principles I have striven to inculcate apply 
with equal force to dry fly fishing of every kind and description, 
whether with duns, sedges, or May-flies, and most, if not indeed 
all of them, are equally applicable to trout fishing with the sunk 
or wet fly. 
