of the elect. So when my destiny did indeed bring me to the side of the Darenth with a split cane rod and a floating line (well greased, believe me) and a little bottle of oil at my button and a boxful of assorted duns and a season's permit in my pocket, you may be sure that I was inclined very scornfully to regard the unintelligent horde who, with their clumsy casts of three, lash the waters of the north country. I thought that I had arrived. I had not. From the dizzy heights to which I had mounted I looked backwards and downwards to where the groundlings, whose company I had quitted for ever, plied their dull tasks, and had never a thought, in my ignorance and arrogance, for the cold, clear, distant peaks which lay above my head, whose very existence I did not suspect, to which I now know I shall never climb.
For though I have fished chalk-streams for many years, I am still a bungler, and a bungler I shall live and die. They say that there is always room at the top. This is not the case. To attain the highest in any abstract science, such as dry-fly fishing can become, a man must be made of rarer clay than mine. There is in my nature an ineradicable thirst for the death of fishes which shall for ever exclude me from the company of
