without doing his chances of sport any harm whatever, should cause the wet-fly man to think better of himself. But he does not know this. Again, he does not realise that the dry-fly man owes half his vaunted accuracy of casting to the rod-maker and the line-spinner, and that in this particular also they are pretty much on a level (it is understood again that I speak of the skilful of both schools). He does not realise that to be the dry-fly man's equal, if not superior, he has only to buy a certain kind of apparatus, to learn not to work his fly, to avoid drag, to pull in his slack and to distinguish between a number of unfamiliar artificial patterns—all matters surely within his competence.
No, he accepts the estimate which the world, taught by the dry-fly man, has formed of his attainments, and until he has tried a chalk-stream for himself, imagines that he might as well fish in his mother's pail as in the Test. He is all wrong, and here is an incident to encourage him.
In the early part of this century a man, whom I will call MacArthur, came upon me out of the East, demanding a chalk-stream and instruction in the dry-fly business. As he made it already understood that he was to pay for the chalk-stream, I undertook to introduce him to a water which I had fished during the five previous
