However, the ancient longing lives in him, and the Sunday morning trains
from Paddington are full of early fishing-men. But it cannot be that
most of them are after trout, the Thames trout being so artful that it
needs a week's work and private information to come to terms with him.
Hitherto he has been spun for chiefly, or coaxed with live bait; but now
people think that a good big loch fly may win his affections. It is to
be hoped that this view is correct, for the attempts by spinning and with
live bait are calculated to stretch and crack even the proverbial
patience of anglers. Persons conscious of less enduring mettle in their
mind will soon be off to the moorland waters of Devonshire, or the
Border, where trout are small, fairly plentiful, and come early into
season. About the upper waters of Severn, where Sabrina is still unvexed
by pollution, and where the stream is not greater than Tweed at Peebles,
sport is fair in spring.

Though the Devonshire, and Border, and probably the Welsh waters, are
just in their prime, the season is not yet for the Itchen and the Kennet,
with their vast over-educated and over-fed monsters of the deep. Though
there may be respectable angling for accomplished artists thereabouts in
late April and May, the true sport does not begin till the May-fly comes
in, which he generally does in June. Then the Kennet is a lovely and
seductive spectacle to the angler. Between the turns of sun and shower
the most beautiful delicate insects, frail as gossamer and fair as a
fairy, are born, and flit for their hour, and float down the water, soon
to be swallowed by the big four-pound trout. He who has no experience of
this angling, and who comes to it from practice in the North, at first
thinks he cannot go wrong. There is the smooth clear water, broken every
moment by a trout's nose, just gently pushed up, but indicating, by the
size of the ripple, that a monster is feeding below. You think, if you