FISHING WITH THE DRY FLY. 143 



quick to place tlieir representative at the end of his line, he may 

 expect no sport. 



Dry Fly fishing is an invention of late years. In delicacy and 

 difficulty it compares with common Fly fishing as that does with 

 worm-fishing in a flooded stream. In Dry Fly fishing, the angler 

 walks up the bank of the stream, curiously scanning its surface. 

 He comes to the " tail of a pool." Two or three small trout rise 

 at intervals in the troubled water, leaping bodily above the surface 

 more in play than hunger, but the fisherman passes on. In chalk 

 streams, where trout are fat on the good living the waters afford, 

 fish run heavy, and these small fish are not sizeable occupants of 

 the basket of a serious angler. He therefore disregards them, 

 and presently comes to where the water deepens between lofty 

 banks ; an alder stump projects from the opposite side, and his 

 eye dwells on the swirl that the trunk and roots cause in the 

 river's current. Just where the flowing water lines, like an 

 elongated S, melt into the general ripple of the stream, his keen 

 eye notes an intermittent movement in the water. A casual 

 observer might look at it for five minutes with a field-glass, and 

 see nothing beyond the interrupted lines of water caused by the 

 tree trunk ; but those oily-looking undulations, and every two or 

 three minutes those little, half-imperceptible eddyings, are caused 

 by the m.ovements of a heavy trout lying some six inches below 

 the surface; his head is, of course, up stream, and he is waiting 

 for the dun-flies and gnats, and alder and sedge-flies, that float 

 down upon the current. While in an ordinary cast of flies the 

 insects are as often beneath as on the surface, the object of the 

 Dry Fly fisher is to imitate the action^ of the natural fly as it 

 floats down, with its filmy wings upraised ; the imitation of the fly 



