be scanned successfully in a broad-brimmed hat. The brim can hardly be too broad; mine might have been sired by an umbrella. But when I carry an umbrella (my hat is not nearly so large, of course, as an umbrella) nobody sniggers, nobody calls, "Come out, I can see your feet!" Yet this admonition is commonly offered me by the waggonetteers. This hat, like the hats of other fishermen, is almost covered with flies; but where else am I to put my flies to dry, now that the front of my fishing coat has no more room for them? Honestly, I can think of no other place which would be at all convenient. I have a few in my trousers, but they got there unintentionally, and when I am fishing they are quite inaccessible. I have no reason to think the trousers a good place for carrying flies. And if a broad-brimmed hat covered with feathers and fur is a risible object, what gaiety should reign in Regent Street during shopping hours! But I have never noticed any excess of it thereabouts at those times. To give an instance of the sort of thing my hat causes otherwise decent people to say, a man once told me that I looked like a boomfood mushroom that had gone into the catch'em-alive-o business. But what, I ask, am I to do? Must I suffer agonies from sunburn and eyestrain that malice may have no vent? I think not.
