You take up your rod again, and pass your hand down the line and cast. Where is that fly? Caught up somewhere in your struggles with the trout. It is engagingly fixed in your coat, about the small of your back. So you lay your rod down again, take off your coat, and extricate your fly with your knife at the cost of some of the cloth of your coat. Pack up your things and trudge home somewhat annoyed with yourself and thinking of the opportunities you had lost, and determining next evening to have some points of gut attached to suitable flies in your cap, ready for the fray—no more threading eyes under such adverse conditions for you.
Next evening you repair to the place where you know the big trout lie and are sure to rise well. Fully equipped in every detail, and determined not to be induced to hurry, but to take things quietly and composedly, you reach your station. What is that in the meadow over there? A mist, by Jove! And soon the aforesaid mist begins to rise on the water, most effectually stopping all hope of sport; so reluctantly you leave the water side, a sadder and a wiser man, reflecting that the evening rise is by no means the certainty you had fondly hoped.
Of course it is not always so. I recollect one evening on the Test, when, after a hot day with scarce a semblance of a feeding fish, except tailers, there was a grand evening rise, and on a big red quill I got seven fish, almost from the same spot, in little over a quarter of an hour; but these days are too infrequent to alter my stated opinion that the evening rise is an overrated pleasure, and generally produces vexation of spirit.
If you do fish in the evening hours, recollect that you must be just as cautious in approaching fish as if it were broad daylight; that any sign of drag will as effectually put a fish down as in the earlier hours. Your fly must float and cock as jauntily as in the morning, but you lose the chief charm of fishing the floating fly, namely, that you cannot spot your fish in the water and watch their movements; you have to cast at a rise, or where you imagine a rise to have been. Use a small fly at first and then a little later change to a big red quill, or, if the sedge flies are out, to a small dark sedge. You can afford to have a point of stronger gut, for you will have often to play a fish pretty hard, and they don't appear to be so gut shy as the evening closes in. But as soon as you can no longer see your sedge fly on the water, reel up. Fishing in the dark is no true sport, and it is uncommonly near to poaching.
CHAPTER VII.
"JACK."
THE upper waters of the Bourne and Test flow through Hurstbourne, Lord Portsmouth's beautiful park, and were tenanted until a few years ago by portly trout of aldermanic weight and size. It was found, however, that they proved too costly to be retained, as the toll they took of the smaller fish was prodigious, and out of proportion to their value. They were accordingly captured by degrees, and replaced by a more numerous colony of smaller fish. It used to be a grand sight to watch the big fellows lying in the quick water near the big stone bridge, or chasing the pounders with angry rushes.
When I knew the water, some ten or twelve years ago, there were still a few of these goodly-proportioned fish remaining. They were well-known, and each one had his nickname. Thus one was known as "Jack"; he almost invariably lay in a narrow outlet to a culvert that led the surplus water from the pool above under the roadway into the pool below the bridge. For the greater portion of its length the water ran underground, emerging from the culvert some two or three yards from the river. The ground on either side at the end of the culvert was fully three feet above the water, the banks being nearly vertical, while the stream at the culvert's mouth was only about a foot wide. In this narrow gully or channel lay Jack, his nose being only a few inches from the masonry. Any unwary footfall speedily dislodged him from his little bay into the main stream, but by crawling up warily he could be seen and admired.