mouth and gone down to gorge; and when he comes up again, if your fly
be the first which he meets, he will probably seize it greedily, and
all the more so if it be under water, so seeming drowned and
helpless. Besides, a fish seldom rises twice exactly in the same
place, unless he be lying between two weeds, or in the corner of an
eddy. His small wits, when he is feeding in the open, seem to hint
to him that after having found a fly in one place he must move a foot
or two on to find another; and therefore it may be some time before
your turn comes, and your fly passes just over his nose; which if it
do not do, he certainly will not, amid such an abundance, go out of
his way for it. In the meanwhile your footlink will very probably
have hit him over the back, or run foul of his nose, in which case
you will not catch him at all. A painful fact for you; but if you
could catch every fish you saw, where would be the trout for next
season?

Put on a dropper of some kind, say a caperer, as a second chance. I
almost prefer the dark claret-spinner, with which I have killed very
large fish alternately with the green-drake, even when it was quite
dark; and for your stretcher, of course a green-drake.

For a blustering evening like this your drake can hardly be too large
or too rough; in brighter and stiller weather the fish often prefer a
fly half the size of the natural one. Only bear in mind that the
most tempting form among these millions of drakes is that one whose
wings are very little coloured at all, of a pale greenish yellow;
whose body is straw-coloured, and his head, thorax, and legs, spotted
with dark brown--best represented by a pheasant or coch-a-bonddhu
hackle.