more successfully exalted one set of men at the expense of another. You would suppose that any fool can go and throw a blue upright into the Barle at Dulverton and pull it out again with a trout on it. You would imagine that no chalk-stream fish may be lured at a less distance than seventy yards.
Now there is no special merit in fishing with a long line. No good fisherman, wet or dry, gives a trout an inch more than is absolutely necessary. Perhaps, of the two, the wet-fly man uses the longer line, and he certainly, if he means to catch fish, throws as "fine," by which I understand "light," as the wet condition of his lure will let him. But "fine and far off" remains the special property of the dry-fly school, and the wet-fly men continue to go about under the imputation of "chucking it and chancing it." This shows how important it is to be first in any field, even of mutual recrimination. The arrogant dry-fly school has fastened "chuck and chance it" on the other fellows for ever, and nobody pays any attention to their answering "creeping and crawling" beyond stamping it vulgar and jealous abuse.
This cheap sneer at the wet-fly man has proved so successful that he himself has come to believe that it is true. He forgets that his knowledge
