ng the insect on the water. As far as
my own experience goes, if trout are feeding on duns, one dun will take
them as well as another, if it be properly presented. But my friend Mr.
Charles Longman tells me that, after failing with two trout, he examined
the fly on the water, an olive dun, and found in his book a fly which
exactly matched the natural insect in colour. With this he captured his
brace.

Such incidents look as if trout were particular to a shade, but we can
never be certain that the angler did not make an especially artful and
delicate cast when he succeeded. Sir Herbert Maxwell intends to make the
experiment of using duns of impossible and unnatural colours; if he
succeeds with these, on several occasions, as well as with orthodox
flies, perhaps we may decide that trout do not distinguish hues. On a
Sutherland loch, an angler found that trout would take flies of any
colour, except that of a light-green leaf of a tree. This rejection
decidedly looked as if even Sutherland loch trout exercised some
discrimination. Often, on a loch, out of three flies they will favour
one, and that, perhaps, not the trail fly. The best rule is: when you
find a favourite fly on a salmon river, use it: its special favouritism
may be a superstition, but, at all events, salmon do take it. We cannot
afford to be always making experiments, but Mr. Herbert Spencer, busking
his flies the reverse way, used certainly to be at least as successful
with sea trout as his less speculative neighbours in Argyllshire.

In making rods, Walton is most concerned with painting them; 'I think a
good top is worth preserving, or I had not taken care to keep a top above
twenty years.' Cotton prefers rods 'made in Yorkshire,' having advanced
from the home-made stage. His were spliced, and kept up all through the
season, as he had his water at his own door, while Walton trudged to the
Lee and other streams near London, when he was not fishing the Itchen, or
Shawford Brook. _The Angler's Vade Mecum_ recommends eighteen-feet rods:
preferring a fir butt, fashioned by the arrow-maker, a hazel top, and a
tip of whalebone. This authority, even more than Walton, deals in
mysterious 'Oyntments' of gum ivy, horse-leek, asafoetida, man's fat,
cat's fat, powdered skulls, and grave earth. A ghoulish body is the
angler of the _Vade Mecum_. He recommends up-stream fishing, with worm,
in a clear water, and so is a predecessor of Mr. Stewart. 'When you