PROFESSORS OF TROUT FISHING
Diverse Ways to Tackle Trout. By Eric Taverner. (Chatto.
58.)
A Fellowship of Anglers. By Horace G. Hutehin.son. (Long- mans. 10s. 6d.) IT is just a question at what point a game becomes too difficult to be amusing. Not long ago, at a girls' school, where the expert coach in lawn tennis performed seriously her function (indispensable in a modern establishment of the kind), a deputation of damsels came to the head-mistress. "May we," they asked, " sometimes play to amuse our- selves ? " Mr. Taverner's treatise—a manual of equipment and of its use—gives an indifferent angler the feeling that it would be more instructive than amusing to fish in Mr. Taverner's company. Yet beyond a doubt, if people want to catch trout in England to-day, they must realize that it is a difficult job and on many rivers it has to be dry By or nothing ; and with the dry fly no amount of luck will
put the duffer on a level with the expert—as he may: be put again and again in wet fly fishing. The moral is, for the beginner, to go where wet fly fishing is practicable, for the first consideration is to get some fun out of your sport, and till you have caught some of the easy trout you will scarcely begin to be able to tackle the difficult ones. The way to learn fishing is by catching fish. Mr. Taverner can give you some useful hints about the wet fly (which he does not dis- parage), but it is not really so complicated as it sounds in his pages. And some high-power performers with the dry fly are sceptical whether all this entomology is really necessary. " It is not the fly, it is the way of presenting the fly that matters," one of them holds. But the entomology adds, no doubt, to the delight of riverside observation which Mr. Hutchinson brings out so well in his pleasant memories of the Houghton Fishing Club and the Middle Test. His description of seeing a mother stoat get her family across the bridge is fascinating. Mr. Taverner, too, in his last chapter does justice to the amusing game of " dibbing " with natural fly for trout that live and move and have their being under the overhanging branches of a big tree. There is no other fishing in which you see so completely how a trout moves towards a fly and takes a fly ; and although it sounds the deadliest way of all, Mr. Taverner, like. the rest of us, has found out its exceeding difficulty. Still, a basket of memories is the best thing to get in fishing, and you are sure of that at least after a spell of the tan- talizing observation which this way of sport involves. Memories don't weigh much, but they last better even than the stuffed trophy of some glorious occasion.
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