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Updated: June 24, 2025
The water, when in good trim, is of a whey colour, though after June it becomes low and very clear. The flies I have mentioned are the only ones really necessary, and if the fish will not take them they will probably take nothing. They are, to sum up: March Brown. Olive Dun. Blue Dun. May-fly. Alder. Palmer.
There is a little fly, called the May-fly, which usually makes its appearance in the month of August, and which visits the districts watered by the Seine and the Marne in such abundance, that the fishermen of these rivers believe it is showered down from heaven, and accordingly call its living clouds, manna.
She sprang up hurriedly, pointing to the boat below; to its one preoccupied figure, clad neither in rough sweater nor May-fly gaudiness, now, but, if the sunset didn't exaggerate, in a very becoming dark suit. "Humph! I don't know! I guess he is! Didn't think he could pull it off for some reason or other " Stud's shoulders were shrugged. "But, maybe, he's found where there's a will there's a way."
Among gentlemen-fishermen, on the other hand, so deep is the ignorance of the natural fly, that I have known good sportsmen still under the delusion that the great green May-fly comes out of a caddis-bait; the gentlemen having never seen, much less fished with, that most deadly bait the "Water-cricket," or free creeping larva of the May-fly, which may be found in May under the river- banks.
On this day, however, although the may-fly was not yet properly up, the big fish, which generally feed at night, had been brought on the rise by the sheep-washing. All the way home we are regaled with impossible stories of big fish taken in these waters, one of which, the keeper says, weighed five pounds, "all but a penny piece."
Last season my brother lost a fly and two yards of gut through a big trout breaking his tackle, but two minutes afterwards he caught the fish and recovered his fly and his tackle. We constantly catch fish during the may-fly time with broken tackle in their mouths. Who does not recollect the rapturous excitement caused by the first fish caught in early youth?
But in the Wandle, at Carshalton and Beddington, the May-fly is not found; and the little blues are the constant, and, when well imitated, killing flies on this water; to which may be joined a dark alder-fly, and a red evening fly.
In a week the lilac and sweet honeysuckle will fill the air with grateful redolence. Ah! a may-fly. But I know this is only a false alarm. There are always a few stray ones about at this time; the fly will not be "up" for ten days at least. When it does come, the stream, so smooth and glassy now, will be "like a pot a-boiling," as the villagers say.
Wife, children, friends in the clear, white light of his logic they are exposed as frauds and shams. He sees through them, and all that he sees is their frailty, their meagreness, their sordidness, their pitifulness. No longer do they fool him. They are miserable little egotisms, like all the other little humans, fluttering their May-fly life-dance of an hour. They are without freedom.
Surely no trout could have been misled by the artificial May-fly of that time, unless he were either a very young fish, quite new to entomology, or else one afflicted with a combination of myopy and bulimy.
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