Fly and Lie.

The fly-fisher believes that “everything comes to him who wades.” He is a piscatorial Macawber, wading for something to turn up. The scope of his wandering is so wide that a legend has arisen relating to his poverty of veracity. There are even coarse persons who call him a liar. This is not fair; he is a creative artist who occasionally gets confused between (1) the fish he hopes to catch, (2) the fish he has caught, and (3) the fish he thinks he has caught. He simply has to be a man of imagination, for troutery demands strange knowledge far beyond the limits of mere fishing. Trout fishing is temperamentally affected by practically everything ranging through the value of the yen, the scarcity of calories in the Russian Diet, and the price of minnows in Minorca. A fly-fisher needs to be versatile, and if he is really earnest he takes a course in navigation, bone-setting, hammer-throwing, mesmerism, and pancake-tossing—just to be on the safe side.