must confess that the love of the familiar silk and hair line,
with which we of the old guard learned how to cast a fly, abides with
me to this day, and with it I, for one, can associate the hair cast,
and a certain ancient pony up in Yorkshire who was famous for his
never-failing tail supply of the best white strands, which were
considered indispensable by the fishers of all Wharfedale. Halford,
however, objected to the line, which certainly was given to
waterlogging and sagging at inconvenient times, and eagerly he took up
the dressing of modern lines. He had a hand in all the developments of
the process, and only declared himself satisfied when the Hawksley line
was perfected, leaving others to this day who are aiming at still more
betterment.
How Halford accumulated his experience, building up a fabric so to
speak, brick by brick, is told in the _Autobiography_ and the other
books written by him; and I may, in passing, suggest that in reading
Halford in these volumes you must always read very carefully between
the lines. You never know when you will find a pearl. The apparently
prosaic statement often contains a valuable lesson, and what seems to
be a sentence merely recording the capture of a trout of given inches
and ounces will be found to have been written with the object of
sustaining an argument or enforcing a truth.
The story in the _Autobiography_ of the fishing on the Wandle in those
early years is an instance in point. It is quite a short narrative
destitute of embroidery, and seemingly a casual introduction to what
shall come after, but it is in reality a revelation of the practical
methods that governed him from first to last, and which I venture to
sum up in one word "thorough." There is a paragraph telling how he
overcame a difficulty in circumventing a certain trout that lay about
the mouth of a culvert, and habitually flouted the Wandle rods.
Halford made it a problem and solved it at the opening of his second
Wandle season. He studied the position, obtained the necessary
permission to put white paint on a patch of branches, have them cut
down during the winter, and next season went down with his plan of
campaign in his head. Of course, it succeeded. On the face of it you
here have just an ordinary incident with nothing much in it. But it
emphasises the value of the horizontal cast and something of its
secret, while the kernel of the nut is the fact that it illustrates the
efficiency of
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