Some Books of the Week
Puatisuno in 1924 at ten guineas, the reappearance of Major j. IV. Hills' A Summer on the Test (Philip Allan, 15s.) at a new price and with the addition of seven chapters makes it really a new book. And it is a noble book, useful withal; for the forty yearn' experience of a .thinking angler warrants it as a practical guide. Perhaps Summers on the Test would have been a better title, since there is here not only the record of one sommer,but of many, and there is told too some of the past fishing history of the famous river, as well as of the Test of to-day " with its crystal streams and its portly trout, with its lovely valley, its bridges, its trees, its chalk cliffs, and its broad water-meadows." There is about this generous book no pontificality of tone, none of the intolerant dictatorship of the . .
dry-fly purist ; persuasively the author guides you, delight- fully he argues. But sometimes he has to " tell " you, as thus : the dry-fly appeared "because sunk-fly fishing was too diflicult " ; grayling on almost every ground are a curse to a trout-stream ; the .maylly is increasing on the Test ; fishing faults, like striking too soon, are incurable ; when e fish refuses a winged fly, try him with a wingless., Liberal in the extreme is Major ; he recommends for, the Test the partridge hackle and orange and the dotterel and yellow of the North ; and it may be (though he doesn't say so) that the famous waterhen bloa of the North country waters would kill on the Test as well. The signal worth of the book is fittingly framed in the dreaming decorations of Mr. Ntirman Wilkinson.
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