by letting the
joint rust, you may find it difficult to take down your rod. When I see
a trout rising, I always cast so as to get hung up, and I frighten him as
I disengage my hook. I invariably fall in and get half-drowned when I
wade, there being an insufficiency of nails in the soles of my brogues.
My waders let in water, too, and when I go out to fish I usually leave
either my reel, or my flies, or my rod, at home. Perhaps no other man's
average of lost flies in proportion to taken trout was ever so great as
mine. I lose plenty, by striking furiously, after a series of short
rises, and breaking the gut, with which the fish swims away. As to
dressing a fly, one would sooner think of dressing a dinner. The result
of the fly-dressing would resemble a small blacking-brush, perhaps, but
nothing entomological.

Then why, a persevering reader may ask, do I fish? Well, it is stronger
than myself, the love of fishing; perhaps it is an inherited instinct,
without the inherited power. I may have had a fishing ancestor who
bequeathed to me the passion without the art. My vocation is fixed, and
I have fished to little purpose all my days. Not for salmon, an almost
fabulous and yet a stupid fish, which must be moved with a rod like a
weaver's beam. The trout is more delicate and dainty--not the sea-trout,
which any man, woman, or child can capture, but the yellow trout in clear
water.

A few rises are almost all I ask for: to catch more than half a dozen
fish does not fall to my lot twice a year. Of course, in a Sutherland
loch one man is as good as another, the expert no better than the duffer.
The fish will take, or they won't. If they won't, nobody can catch them;
if they will, nobody can miss them. It is as simple as trolling a minnow
from a boat in Loch Leven, probably the lowest possible form of angling.
My ambition is as great as my skill is feeble; to capture big trout with
the dry fly in the Test, that would content me, and nothing under that.
But I can't see the natural fly on the water; I cannot see my own fly,

Let it sink or let it swim.

I often don't see the trout rise to me, if he is such a fool as to rise;
and I can't strike in time when I do see him. Besides, I am unteachable
to tie any of the orthodox knots in the gut; it takes me half an hour to
get the gut through one of these newfangled iron eyes, and, when it is
through, I knot it any way. The "jam" knot is a name to me, and no more.