These are the magic words; and no time is lost
in responding to the invitation, for, as prearranged, he is to start for
Gloucestershire directly the wire arrives.

There is no need to rush off to Mr. Farlow and buy up his stock of
may-flies; for though he does not tie his own flies, our angling friend
has a goodly stock of them neatly arranged in rows of cork inside a
black tin box; and, depend upon it, they are the _right_ ones.

Many a fisherman goes through a lifetime without getting the right flies
for the water on which he angles. It is ten to one that those in the
shops are too light, both in the body and the wing; the may-flies
usually sold are likewise much too big. About half life-size is quite
big enough for the artificial fly, and as a general rule they cannot be
too _dark_.

Some years ago we caught a live fly, and took it up to London for the
shopman to copy. "At last," we said to ourselves, "we have got the right
thing." But not a bit of it. The first cast on to the water showed us
that the fly was utterly wrong. It was far too light. The fact is, the
insect itself appears very much darker on the water than it does in the
air. But the artificial fly shows ten times lighter as it floats on the
stream than it does in the shop window.

Dark mottled grey for your wings, and a brown hackle, with a dark rather
than a straw-coloured body, is the kind of fly we find most killing on
the upper Coln. Of course it may be different on other streams, but I
suspect there is a tendency to use too light a fly everywhere, save
among those who have learnt by experience how to catch trout. As Sir
Herbert Maxwell has proved by experiment, trout have no perception of
colour except so far as the fly is light or dark. He found dark blue and
red flies just as killing as the ordinary may-fly.

For the dry-fly fisherman equipment is half the battle. Show me the man
who catches fish; ten to one his rod is well balanced and strong, his
line heavy, though tapered, and his gut well selected and stained. The
fly-book stamps the fisherman even more truly than the topboot stamps
the fox-hunter. Nor does the accomplished expert with the dry fly
disdain with fat of deer to grease his line, nor with paraffin to dress
his fly and make it float. But he keeps the paraffin in a leather case
by itself, so that his coat may not remain redolent for months. From
top to toe he is a fisherman. His boots are thick, even though he does
not require