across and across for weary hours, while the big papas and mammas are
comfortably under the bank, close at his feet, grubbing about the
sides for water crickets, and not refusing at times a leech or a
young crayfish, but perfectly ready to take a fly if you offer one
large and tempting enough. They do but act on experience. All the
largest surface-food--beetles, bees, and palmers--comes off the
shore; and all the caperers and alders, after emerging from their
pupa-cases, swim to the shore in order to change into the perfect
insect in the open air. The perfect insects haunt sunny sedges and
tree-stems--whence the one is often called the sedge, the other the
alder-fly--and from thence drop into the trouts' mouths; and within
six inches of the bank will the good angler work, all the more
sedulously and even hopefully if he sees no fish rising. I have
known good men say that they had rather NOT see fish on the rise, if
the day be good; that they can get surer sport, and are less troubled
with small fish, by making them rise; and certain it is, that a day
when the fish are rising all over the stream is generally one of
disappointment.

Another advantage of bank fishing is, that the fish sees the fly only
for a moment. He has no long gaze at it, as it comes to him across
the water. It either drops exactly over his nose, or sweeps down the
stream straight upon him. He expects it to escape on shore the next
moment, and chops at it fiercely and hastily, instead of following
and examining. Add to this the fact that when he is under the bank
there is far less chance of his seeing you; and duly considering
these things, you will throw away no more time in drawing, at least
in chalk-streams, flies over the watery wastes, to be snapped at now
and then by herring-sized pinkeens. In rocky streams, where the
quantity of bank food is far smaller, this rule will perhaps not hold