saw me in my everyday clothes you would never dream of thinking me a comical object; you would not notice me at all. I am quite inconspicuous as a general rule, but when I go fishing these painful demonstrations greet me from everyone not fortunate enough to dwell beside a chalk-stream. It can only be my rig. But what, I repeat, am I to do? I believe that I may look a little more out of the way than some other anglers. At no time am I a dapper man, and with the large excuses which the craft affords me, a native carelessness slides easily into that wholehearted lack of decorum which is best observed emergent from a field of ripe grain. I wear my oldest clothes, and how old they are it is now quite impossible to say, but they are delicious to my body, and barbed wire can do them no harm whatever. I have seen natty anglers, men in new clothes with waders that fitted them like skin, brogues that would have done credit to any lady's drawing-room, snowy linen, jewellery, buttonholes—one even with his oil bottle in a little bag of chamois leather, as if it had been a watch fresh home from the makers. I have dubbed them carpet-fishermen, but in my heart I knew that they—some of them, most of them—killed more fish than I. The unconventional attire in which the American humorous artist loves to dress his
