Woodcock. Woodcock. Straw colour silk, or martin Ginger. cat's fur, ribbed with brown 2 mallard's feathers dyed yellow. Dark grey widgeon or mallard's feather. NAME. BODY. HACKLE. WINGS. Copper-coloured floss silk. Black. Dark red silk, with peacock's Red. her wound thickly at the tail. Black silk, with black ostrich Black. herl worked thickly at the tail. 22, Welchman's Button. Peacock's herl, wound thickly. Black. CHAPTER VIII. "With pliant rod, athwart the pebbled brook, And, with a fur-wrought fly, delude the prey.” GAY. HAVING given, in the preceding chapters, what we hope will prove sufficient instructions for the selection and manufacture of the various implements employed in fly-fishing, it is now our business to explain their use. But we must first remind the reader that a knowledge of the art is not to be acquired from the simple perusal of rules and instructions, any more than a person can learn to swim without entering the water. That knowledge can only result, as in every similar case, in proportion to the display of judgment in applying and of industry in practising them. "He," saith our father Izaac, "who undertakes to make a man that was none to be an angler by a book, will undertake a harder task than Mr. Hales, a most valiant and excellent fencer, who, in a printed book called A Private School of Defence,' undertook to teach that art or science and got laughed at for his labour; not but that many useful things might be learnt from that book, but he was laughed at because that art was not to be learnt by words but practice- and so must angling. Seeing," addeth Izaac, “that as no man is born an artist, so no man is born an angler, I thought fit to give thee this notice." There was formerly a prejudice against the seeking in books for angling instructions, as, indeed, there was against book-learning of every kind; but happily the day is gone to render necessary anything like argument to show the folly of such a prejudice. There is no earthly reason why a book on this subject should not be just as useful to a young angler as other books are to the seeker after other kinds of information; nor why the experience of anglers should not also be preserved and communicated by means of the printer's art, as well as that of others whose writings "the schoolmaster" has prepared most people, now-a-day, to comprehend and profit by. We take it for granted, therefore, that while it is quite possible to write a good and an instructive book on this fascinating art, the precepts of that art will be comparatively valueless if not prac |