IZAAK WALTON's expedient of conveying information by means of a fictitious dialogue between an adept and a tiro in angling, delightfully naïve and fresh as his pages remain, impart a musty threadbare cast to modern literature.

'Well now, good master,' says Venator, in the most natural way, 'as we walk towards the river give me direction, according to your promise, how I shall fish for a trout.'

My honest scholar, I will take this very convenient opportunity to do it,' replies Piscator, and proceeds to dilate, with delicious irrelevance, on the mysteries of the craft. Never shall these immortal symposia lose their charm, for through all the hundred editions they have passed there still breathes the very air and sunlight of far-off English summers. It is but a scurvy substitute that we have devised in these latter days. Nevertheless, in spite of all the imprecations which have been heaped on the head of the Interviewer, it must be patent to all who have suffered under his operations (and who so obscure as to have escaped them?) that the most commonplace mind may be galvanised into spasms of liveliness by a master of the art. Even if nothing felicitous occurs to the patient while he is on the rack, he is sure to think afterwards of lots of interesting

things he might have said, and deplore their loss. Perhaps one who has undergone quite lately a searching dissection of this kind may try to put his lacerated thoughts into some semblance of order, and repeat the substance of what passed, omitting, of course, most of the operator's questions.

He came to obtain my views on matters piscatorial, and I was firmly resolved to tell him nothing that could be of the slightest use to any novice. Peradventure if he had come alone. this resolution would have remained unshaken; but my undoing came by reason of a young person he brought with him to take shorthand notes-a person with a Greek profile, violet eyes with long lashes, a changeful complexion of cream and roses, and a willowy figure. As often as prudence bid my lips be scaled, this young person turned her eyes on mine, and I became as transparent as an enchylosed joint under the X rays.

After admitting, not without blushes, that I had some notions about fly-fishing, and had written and spoken a great deal too much on that subject already, I cleared my throat and, in answer to a question of a general character, began as follows:

In the spring the young man's fancy lightly-the young person aforesaid took her pencil from the paper and turned on me a look of melancholy surprise. Madam-sir, I mean-I am not going to say what you think; I am talking, look you, of a young man of discernment and balance: lightly, as I was saying, turns to thoughts of March browns, olive duns, split-cane rods, and the gut crop. Were it not for the certainty that so many at this season do assuredly concentrate their faculties on fly-fishing, wild horses should not drag from me a single word on the subject, except such as might deter others from the waterside.

Why? For several reasons; chiefly because if a man knows, or fancies he knows, more of the craft than his fellows, he is injuring his own chances by showing them how to become more proficient. Besides, it is distinctly foolish to dilate on the joys of angling, which can only serve to attract recruits to the host of fishers, already far too vast. For fly-fishing differs from less delicate sport in this respect: there are inexorable limits to the numbers that may take part in it. A trout pricked is a trout spoilt. Whereas in shooting it is merely a question of how many pheasants shall be reared annually; there will be targets for all. In hunting, the numbers that follow the fashionable packs are already so vast, that half a hundred more or less on a Quorn Monday is of little moment to the handful who cut out the work. But in fly-fishing matters are coming to a pass. The rents now

paid for trout-fishing within reach of London far exceed anything dreamt of for the best salmon casts anywhere a few years ago. As for salmon-fishing, it is probably no exaggeration to estimate the cost to the angler of every fish he lands, at all events in the first half of the year, at not less than its weight in solid silver. Witness the rent given two seasons ago the disastrous season of 1893-for one of the more famous stretches on the Tweed. The lessee, an excellent angler, paid, as is said, 2,000l., in return for which he secured some twenty-three autumn fish, weighing, say, 350 lbs.

Do I approve of ladies angling? Assuredly not. Supposing on a liberal computation that there are, on an average, fifty trout to be caught in a season by every angler of the male sex, that average must be indefinitely reduced if ladies are to claim. their share. No; the recognised and useful function of an English lady being to translate the masterly, but forcible, criticism of her lord on the supply of his table into a paraphrase suitable to the understanding of the cook, what reason can be found for disturbing that order of things? It is true that, in London, ladies find out other avenues of occupation: so much the more cause for their gratefully accepting an arrangement under which husbands betake themselves out of town to pursue their fascinating, if selfish, pursuit on the flowery banks of secluded chalk streams. Besides, ladies-Heaven bless 'em!-don't really enjoy fishing. It is difficult to penetrate the motives and sensations of the lower ani (the shorthand writer raised her eyes) that is, hem!-of the gentler sex; but there can be, I take it, no question that their perceptions are less keen than ours. A woman when she is fishing thinks far more about how her hat is trimmed than about how her fly is floating. Not the less does she disturb the water, and thereby interferes with serious sport.

Touching the cruelty of fishing, it is far more apparent than real. I can answer for it by experience that the mere fact of a hook sticking in the lip is not accompanied by any anguish. Late one night I was preparing some tackle for salmon-fishing on the morrow, when, biting a knot at the head of a fly about two inches long, I let it slip, and the barb buried itself deep in my lower lip. Everybody had gone to bed; there was no help at hand; I set to work to strip the dressing from the hook, and, passing it through the flesh in the same direction it had entered, brought it out without much pain or difficulty. Had it been a double hook the situation doubtless would have been more complicated. Now it must be admitted that a human lip is a good deal

more sensitive than the bony jaws of a fish. The suffering of a salmon or trout, during what we grimly call the 'play,' consists in its terror; and every angler knows that, after the first surprise of being hooked, and the rush that ensues thereon, fish do not exhibit much terror as long as they do not catch sight of the captor. But every time one walks down the river-bank, scores of fish endure a similar shock to their nerves, and dart away in horror of man's presence. As for the agony of being enclosed and drawn ashore in a net, that must be far more acute than any amount of pulling at the end of a line. It follows, therefore, that, if fish are to be caught at all, the rod and line is a method not less merciful than any other.

Up to this point, it will be observed, I had kept my antagonist pretty well at bay. Alas! he was no bungler at his work. He knew that all harness has its joints, and the moment was at hand when, with a masterly riposta, he should pass under my defence. Still I managed to parry his thrusts for a little longer. Asked if I practised one branch of fly-fishing more than another, I said that so long as the quarry was of the salmon tribe I was pretty keen for all kinds. But even within the limits of that game family of fish, what a scope and variety there is in the sport! Here, for example, are two specimens of flies, each of which comes into use within the compass of a single season. Many a good February

salmon has been accounted for in the Thurso by the burly original of fig. 1. Its prevailing tints are like the Northumberland miner's handkerchief- Nane o' your gaudy colours; just gie me plain reed and yellah;' and one calls it a fly, but in sooth it might just

as fitly be called a bootjack or a Sunday bonnet. In the normal ferocity of a Caithness winter nothing in the shape of a fly could trust itself on wing; if it could, no salmon would pay it the slightest attention; for, as the experience has proved, so long as the snow is running off, not a fin can be got to wag for anything less conspicuous than this monster.

There dwells a wise man, Rory by name, at Westerdale, hard by where the sullen torrent is chafed into brief fury by the opposing rocks which form the mill streams, who spends his days contriving simulacra such as this; and it is to him those anglers must resort who have laid up store of genteel town-made patterns, before they may hope to feel the ecstasy of bending greenheart, or pull out that silvery prize which, at this season, would sell in London at 3s. 6d. a pound. It is no child's play to hurl such a lure as this about in a roaring nor'-wester, such as is wont to career at large over that desolate land. Woe betide the luckless angler who, deluded into emulation by the artistic ease with which his gillie sends out five-and-thirty yards straight and true across the curling waves, attempts the Spey cast under such circumstances. He will be very apt to find that one of Rory's masterpieces, driven before the gale, can deliver what Mr. Penley in the Private Secretary used to call a good hard knock' on the back of a bungler's head; and if it be the business end of one of these huge hocks that strikes first, the results may be serious. It is a cruel strain on the rod, too, and it is of profit to keep one of the best material, with plenty of weight in the top, on purpose for this early fishing.

Turning to the other end of the scale, here is the little black spider represented in fig. 2, of high repute in the crystal Itchen, what time the lusty trout, surfeited with winged provender, may be tempted to sip at delicacies of slenderer build. Between these two extremes, what a bewildering variety of choice! what room for indecision and imagination! Of course, in trout-fishing there is much more need for close imitation of different flies than in salmon-fishing. The trout will not take your fly unless he can be persuaded it is a genuine insect. But who can say for what the salmon takes your Jock Scott' or your Sir Richard'? Though I have fished a great many years and in a great many rivers, I have not yet experienced anything to make me prefer one salmon fly to another. If there is a fly in my book which strikes horror into the mind of my gillie, and runs most surely against all his cherished convictions, that fly (at least on those very rare occasions when I am not in abject terror for that dread