mieux. They are hungry, as trout are six days in the week, just at
sunset. A supper they must have, and they take what comes; but if
you can give them anything better than the minute fairy, compact of
equal parts of glass and wind, which naturalists call an Ephemera or
Baetis, it will be most thankfully received, if there be ripple
enough on the water (which there seldom is on a fine evening) to hide
the line: and even though the water be still, take boldly your
caperer or your white moth (either of them ten times as large as what
the trout are rising at), hurl it boldly into a likely place, and let
it lie quiet and sink, not attempting to draw or work it; and if you
do not catch anything by that means, comfort yourself with the
thought that there are others who can.

And now to go through our list, beginning with -

1. The caperer.

This perhaps is the best of all flies; it is certainly the one which
will kill earliest and latest in the year; and though I would hardly
go as far as a friend of mine, who boasts of never fishing with
anything else, I believe it will, from March to October, take more
trout, and possibly more grayling, than any other fly. Its basis is
the woodcock wing; red hackle legs, which should be long and pale;
and a thin mohair body, of different shades of red-brown, from a dark
claret to a pale sandy. It may thus, tied of different sizes, do
duty for half-a-dozen of the commonest flies; for the early claret
(red-brown of Ronalds; a Nemoura, according to him), which is the
first spring-fly; for the red spinner, or perfect form of the March-
brown ephemera; for the soldier, the soft-winged reddish beetle which
haunts the umbelliferous flowers, and being as soft in spirit as in