you awhile of purism and purists and things puristic.
Youth, sir, is proverbially avid of pleasure, and seeks it in a hundred ways, which experience abandons one by one. There was a time when I believed in all honesty that I could gain enjoyment by climbing hills, and in that belief I have struggled to the tops of several mountains. Presently reason triumphed, another illusion was discarded, and I had advanced one further stage in that eliminating process by which human happiness alone can be reached. Now, while in one short summer I mastered the true secret of the hills—that they were made to be admired from below—I also learned another fact about them: that there is always one more summit to be climbed. So with angling.
When, as a child, I threaded my hooks through the unprotesting lips of living minnows in the hope of luring the great chubs of the Kennet, I knew that men far more skilful than I used spinning baits for jack; and I told myself that one day I should be a man and do likewise. Later, promoted to spinning, I lusted ardently to angle with flies for trout. Then, a loch-fisher, I dreamed of chalk-streams and the mysteries of the floating fly. "There," I said, "is the summit, the ne plus ultra, the last rung," and I vowed ere I died to make one
