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The Fly-fishers’ Club.

By Basil Field.

“But now the sport is marde, and wott ye why
Fishes decrease, and fishers multiply.”

River Lea at Ware.

THE GROWTH OF FLY-FISHING is not so obvious as that of many other pastimes. The goal-posts of football, the nets of lawn-tennis, the pavilions of cricket bear silent witness to the prevalence of those games; nor, if the verbal jingle may be pardoned, does it need the “sight of the lynx” to discover the omnipresence of golf; while the detailed reports of matches, which have spread from the strictly sporting newspapers to the columns of the press at large, testify to the growing interest taken in these pastimes. All of these games, however, are essentially contests in which, individually or collectively, man is pitted against man. Even the kindred sport of bank-fishing is more in evidence than fly-fishing to the observant traveller. In the Thames Valley, by the Lea River, on the towing path of canals, on the margin of pond and pool, wherever, in short, free fishing is to be found, the waterside seems dotted with fishermen, each sitting like Patience on a wicker basket watching his float.

Fly-fishing, as becomes the poetry of angling, bids her disciples cast their lines in solitude. In solitude—grand, solemn, and but for the “noise of many waters,” silent, is the capture of the bold sea rover, salmo salar, in his mountain girt native fastness attempted. In solitude—peaceful, smiling, yet silent, too, but for the sighing of the sedge, the “murmur of innumerable bees,” and the friendly twitter of the swallow, is the death of his timid inland cousin, salmo fario, compassed by means of gaudy silk and fraudful feather.

Although the fly-fisher is thus hidden from the common eye, as in a “wilderness of sweets,” it is, however, possible in some sort to gauge his growth. To this end, without laborious investigation of statistics, let us glance at the manufacturer and sale of his implements, and at the literature concerned with his art.

[Single-page format.]

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