of the trout's habits is much larger than that of his self-constituted superior. He forgets that if the two of them (grant me two fishermen of a sort of hypothetical, mathematically abstract character, each knowing nothing of his rival's methods) are placed on the banks of an unknown fast stream, that knowledge will enable him to give the dry-fly man first fishing over every pool and run, and that, after the dry-fly man has laboriously and vainly flogged every inch of the water, he (the wet-fly man) can come along and take a brace or more in a dozen casts, placed deftly in the twelve spots where, from the condition of the water, the state of the weather, the season of the year, and a hundred other things about which the dry-fly man knows nothing at all, he suspects the good fish are lying. He forgets similarly that, placed on the banks of an unknown chalk-stream, he and the dry-fly man are reduced to an equality in that a rise, breaking the surface of the water, speaks to both of them with the same sound, and that a fish lying in mid-stream is equally visible to both of them. He does not realise that a knowledge of the fishes' habits is (I speak comparatively) practically no part of a dry-fly angler's equipment. The mere fact that on a chalk-stream he can jettison the best part of the lore which it has taken him many years to acquire
