combinations too often rehearsed, after the trick has become a habit, and
the method an open mystery.



THE DRY FLY.


As the Easter vacation approaches, the cockney angler, the "inveterate
cockney," as Lord Salisbury did or did not say, begins to look to his
fishing tackle. Now comes in the sweet of the year, and we may regret,
with Mr. Swinburne, that "such sweet things should be fleet, such fleet
things sweet." There are not many days that the London trout-fisher gets
by the waterside. The streams worth his attention, and also within his
reach, are few, and either preserved so that he cannot approach them, or
harried by poachers as well as anglers. How much happier were men in
Walton's day who stretched their legs up Tottenham Hill and soon found,
in the Lea, trout which would take a worm when the rod was left to fish
for itself! In those old days Hackney might be called a fishing village.
There was in Walton's later years a writer on fishing named W. Gilbert,
"Gent." This gent produced a small work called the "Angler's Delight,"
and if the angler was delighted, he must have been very easily pleased.
The book now sells for large sums, apparently because it is scarce, for
it is eminently worthless. The gentle writer, instead of giving
directions about fly-dressing, calmly tells his readers to go and buy his
flies at a little shop "near Powle's." To the "Angler's Delight" this
same W. Gilbert added a tract on "The Hackney River, and the best stands
there." Now there are no stands there, except cabstands, which of course
are uninteresting to the angler. Two hundred years have put his fishing
far away from him.