Harry Druidale, Fisherman from Manzland to England. By Henry Cadman.
(Macmillan and Co. 8s. 6d. net.)—Brought up on the banks of the river Neb, in the Isle of Man, Harry Druidale became an ardent angler from his earliest youth, and of the various waters he has fished, and the baskets of trout he has made, he appears to have kept a pretty accurate record, which he now presents to the public. He tells of his experiences in the streams of the Isle of Man, and of his successes and failures in English rivers, particularly those in the North and in the Border country, but it is doubtful if the book will be of much interest to any one. It is needlessly long, not infrequently wearisome, and the reader tires of twenty-three pages of rather puerile conversation between Druidale and his companions at a fishing inn. Perhaps the best chapters of the book are those four which are devoted respectively to fly-fishing, creeper and stone-fly fishing, worm-fishing, and minnow-fishing. After he had given up tickling trout and snaring them with a noose of horse-hair, it was with a worm that Druidale caught his first fish, and it would seem as though he always retained a respect and regard for that oft-despised method of fishing. Of the difficulty and science of dry-fly fishing he has no very great opinion, and he grudges that, as an art, it should rank higher than fishing with the wet fly. The numerous illustrations of the different scenes visited by Druidale are taken from photographs and well reproduced.
Previous page
