. It was as a Clydesdale
to a thoroughbred. Seeing must then have been believing.

For the present let us forget that wet week. We will return to the
rain, perhaps, another day; suffice now to state that we had three
weeks of it--three weeks and never a day without mackintoshes. Last
night it must have snowed pretty hard up on the fjelds, for there are
at this moment white mantles lower down on the mountains than have been
seen for many a year at this period of the season. The only way by
which I can temporarily forget the weather is to go back to the day
when, in England, the sportsmen were "inaugurating" (there are worse
words than that though it is not pure English) the grouse season. On
August 12 we were on a visit to S., whose river is a few hours'
steaming from the stream upon which I was established in headquarters.
It was our fourth day there, and, as a relief from the salmon rod,
which had found out the unused muscles of my arms and shoulders, I took
a holiday so far as to go out for once with a trout rod. It was a
whole-cane pattern of 10 ft. 6 in. As it was already put together in
the rack at the back of the hotel, I borrowed it just to save the
bother of fixing up my own greenheart. In the tidal portion of the
river capital sport was sometimes to be found with the common trout.
They are Salmo fario of the kind one often catches in Norway--silvery,
marked with a galaxy of small black spots, with a red point here and
there, and game to the death; and their favourite taking time in this
river was when the tide was nearing low water.

On that particular date this happened pretty early, and I was on the
pebbly strand by eight o'clock. Our friends who fish the river use
small March browns, blue duns, and teal and reds for such light
amusement; but I had with me a couple of patterns--to wit, the Killer
(a sea-trout fly which in a previous visit to Norway the small trout
had fancied very freely) and an adaptation of the Alexandra used on the
Costa for grayling. Both have silver bodies, but the former is a study
in yellow, the latter a harmony in peacock-blue; and these special
dressings were on eyed hooks, say about the size of a medium sedge,
though of more scanty material. One of each was put up on an untapered
cast of the finest undrawn gut; but, in ordering the collars to go with
the flies, I had begged that every strand should be of picked stuff,
round and even from end to end, and that they should