e tree
that dropped its boughs to the water, and began casting, merely from a
sense of duty. I had not cast a dozen times before there was a heavy,
slow plunge in the stream, and a glimpse of purple and azure.

"That's him," cried a man who was trouting on the opposite bank.
Doubtless it was "him," but he had not touched the hook. I believe the
correct thing would have been to wait for half an hour, and then try the
fish with a smaller fly. But I had no smaller fly, no other fly at all.
I stepped back a few paces, and fished down again. In Major Traherne's
work I have read that the heart leaps, or stands still, or otherwise
betrays an uncomfortable interest, when one casts for the second time
over a salmon which has risen. I cannot honestly say that I suffered
from this tumultuous emotion. "He will not come again," I said, when
there was a long heavy drag at the line, followed by a shrieking of the
reel, as in Mr. William Black's novels. Let it be confessed that the
first hooking of a salmon is an excitement unparalleled in trout-fishing.
There have been anglers who, when the salmon was once on, handed him over
to the gillie to play and land. One would like to act as gillie to those
lordly amateurs. My own fish rushed down stream, where the big tree
stands. I had no hope of landing him if he took that course, because one
could neither pass the rod under the boughs, nor wade out beyond them.
But he soon came back, while one took in line, and discussed his probable
size with the trout-fisher opposite. His size, indeed! Nobody knows
what it was, for when he had come up to the point whence he had started,
he began a policy of violent short tugs--not "jiggering," as it is
called, but plunging with all his weight on the line. I had clean
forgotten the slimness of the tackle, and, as he was clearly well hooked,
held him perhaps too hard. Only a very raw beginner likes to take hours
over landing a fish. Perhaps I held him too tight: at all events, after
a furious plunge, back came the line; the casting line had snapped at the
top link.

There was no more to be said or done, except to hunt for another fly in
the trout fly-book. Here there was no such thing, but a local spectator
offered me a huge fly, more like a gaff, and equipped with a large iron
eye for attaching the gut to. Withal I suspect this weapon was meant,
not for fair fishing, but for "sniggling." Now "sniggling" is a form of
cold-blooded poaching