Nothing that I could say would persuade him that chalk-stream fishing is pure skittles compared with that he was accustomed to find in a tiny bush-shrouded brook near Midhurst (a place in which he could catch trout all day long while I should have spent my time cutting down trees). Nor could I get him to understand that, easy though dry-fly fishing might be, I am extremely unhandy at it. He said that I only talked like that to encourage him, whereas I was really trying to encourage myself. For I had discovered that I possessed a reputation up to which nobody could possibly live, and as the day approached when I should have to "show him how to do it" at the expense of those fish under whose contempt I had writhed five summers long, I wondered sometimes if I had not better perhaps break my right arm in two places, and so preserve to MacArthur the last ideal that he was ever likely to cherish.
At length the first day of May dawned, and my right arm was still (as much as it had ever been) at my service. I made, as the newspapers relate of the condemned, a hearty breakfast of sausages and bacon, and smoked a cigarette while MacArthur greased his line for the third time since he had risen. Presently we were by the water's edge, and for half an hour I showed MacArthur how to cast his fly over imaginary fishes, and how
