Practical Dry-Fly Fishing 



below, and rocks and bushes made it 

 impossible to assail it from either side; 

 while above, a barrier of rocks was 

 made higher by an old pine tree that 

 had fallen across the stream. Many 

 anglers had schemed to take this 

 trout, but none had succeeded in mak- 

 ing even a good attempt at doing so. 

 To make a long story short, I cast a 

 fly from above the fallen pine tree and 

 over it, without even seeing the water 

 in which the fish lay. The floating fly 

 was so cast that it must have drifted 

 down over the trout; in an instant I 

 either heard, or imagined that I heard 

 the "plop" of a rising fish, and we 

 were at once engaged in a struggle, 

 neither of us in sight of the other. 

 How it was possible from that posi- 

 tion to "play" this trout to a stand- 

 still without getting hopelessly tan- 

 gled I did not know; but in a short 

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