that esoteric few who practise the utmost refinements.
To come at last to my subject. I seem to discover seven separate degrees of dry-fly angling. The lowest fisherman of this kind is the man who is absolutely learning his art. He is content with little results. A single fish is ample reward for a day's toil. A couple of brace sets him quite above himself, and he boasts all winter of a two-pounder. He carries a steelyard in his pocket, and to its test (that every ounce may tell) he submits every fish instantly on its being taken. He spends more than he can afford on the charming little japanned boxes which the tackle-makers sell. He has many hundreds of flies, and presents each pattern patiently to each rising trout until the list, or the fish, becomes exhausted. This tactless fool asks his masters to let him see the fishes they have caught. He cannot understand their reasons for returning them. A fish to him is a fish, and he is not nice in the matter of its colour, rotundity, or sex. The ideal of three brace of eighteen-inch males would never present itself to his mind. He is not æsthetic at all.
A little higher in the scale is the ordinary angler, such as I am; the man who can take a trout now and then when things are going right; who feels a certain reluctance to kill fishes that are not in the
