Having ventured this much concerning what the writer considers _proper_ tackle, he would like to go further and record here his disapproval of the individual who turns up his nose at any rod of over five ounces in weight, and who tells you with an air from which you are expected to infer much, that fly fishing is really the only _honorable_ and _gentlemanly_ manner of taking trout. In the language of one who was a master of concise and forceful phrase, "This is one of the deplorable fishing affectations and pretences which the rank and file of the fraternity ought openly to expose and repudiate. Our irritation is greatly increased when we recall the fact that every one of these super-refined fly-casting dictators, when he fails to allure trout by his most scientific casts, will chase grasshoppers to the point of profuse perspiration, and turn over logs and stones with feverish anxiety in quest of worms and grubs, if haply he can with these save himself from empty-handedness."[B] Fly fishing as a recreation justifies all good that has been written of it, but it is a tell-tale sport that infallibly informs your associates what manner of being you are. It is self-purifying like the limpid mountain stream its followers love, and no wrong-minded individual nor set of individuals can ever pollute it. It is too cosmopolitan a pleasure to belong to the exclusive, and too robust in sentiment to be confined to gossamer gut leaders and midge hooks.
Much, in fact everything, of your success in taking fish in Iron Creek depends on the time of your visit. For three hundred, thirty days of the year it is profitless water. Then come the days when the German trout begin their annual _auswanderung_. No one need be told that these trout do not live in this creek throughout the year. For trout are brook-wise or river-wise according as they have been reared, and the habits, attitudes and behavior of the one are as different from the other as are those of the boys and girls reared in the country from the city-bred. If one of these river-bred fish breaks from the hook here he does not immediately bore up stream into deep water and disappear beneath a sheltering log, bank or submerged tree-top as one would having a claim on these waters, but heading down-stream, he stays not for brake and he stops not for stone till the river is reached. In his headlong haste to escape he reminds one of a country boy going for a doctor.