That, perhaps, is why the hooks crack off so merrily. Then, if I do spot
a rising trout, and if he does not spot me as I crawl like the serpent
towards him, my fly always fixes in a nettle, a haycock, a rose-bush, or
whatnot, behind me. I undo it, or break it, and put up another, make a
cast, and, "plop," all the line falls in with a splash that would
frighten a crocodile. The fish's big black fin goes cutting the stream
above, and there is a _sauve qui peut_ of trout in all directions.

I once did manage to make a cast correctly: the fly went over the fish's
nose; he rose; I hooked him, and he was a great silly brute of a
grayling. The grayling is the deadest-hearted and the foolishest-headed
fish that swims. I would as lief catch a perch or an eel as a grayling.
This is the worst of it--this ambition of the duffer's, this desire for
perfection, as if the golfing imbecile should match himself against Mr.
Horace Hutchinson, or as the sow of the Greek proverb challenged Athene
to sing. I know it all, I deplore it, I regret the evils of ambition;
but _c'est plus fort que moi_. If there is a trout rising well under the
pendant boughs that trail in the water, if there is a brake of briars
behind me, a strong wind down stream, for that trout, in that impregnable
situation, I am impelled to fish. If I raise him I strike, miss him,
catch up in his tree, swish the cast off into the briars, break my top,
break my heart, but--that is the humour of it. The passion, or instinct,
being in all senses blind, must no doubt be hereditary. It is full of
sorrow and bitterness and hope deferred, and entails the mockery of
friends, especially of the fair. But I would as soon lay down a love of
books as a love of fishing.

Success with pen or rod may be beyond one, but there is the pleasure of
the pursuit, the rapture of endeavour, the delight of an impossible
chase, the joys of nature--sky, trees, brooks, and birds. Happiness in
these things is the legacy to us of the barbarian. Man in the future
will enjoy bricks, asphalte, fog, machinery, "society," even picture
galleries, as many men and most women do already. We are fortunate who
inherit the older, not "the new spirit"--we who, skilled or unskilled,
follow in the steps of our father, Izaak, by streams less clear, indeed,
and in meadows less fragrant, than his. Still, they are meadows and
streams, not wholly dispeopled yet of birds and trout; nor can any defect
of art, nor