# An Angler at Large/Chapter 18

Sometimes, as I walk on the valley road on my way to or from the water, a waggonette containing a party of pleasure meets or passes me. I always have the feeling that the incident has sensibly enlivened the journey for these people. Did they seem bored? Smiles appear. Were they hilarious? The downs reverberate with their cachinnations. Mirth in itself is good; therefore I like to hear these people laugh, to see them smile. But mirth of that particular quality is not good. Its other name is derision; it is the child of ignorance, and ignorance is begotten of the pit. Therefore I weep that I should be the cause of stumbling to these poor souls. But what am I to do?
I know that my costume and equipment are to blame, and they alone. In myself I am not a ludicrous-looking man. My features are no more out of drawing than those of ninety-nine in a hundred. I am no homme qui rit. If you ​saw me in my everyday clothes you would never dream of thinking me a comical object; you would not notice me at all. I am quite inconspicuous as a general rule, but when I go fishing these painful demonstrations greet me from everyone not fortunate enough to dwell beside a chalk-stream. It can only be my rig. But what, I repeat, am I to do? I believe that I may look a little more out of the way than some other anglers. At no time am I a dapper man, and with the large excuses which the craft affords me, a native carelessness slides easily into that wholehearted lack of decorum which is best observed emergent from a field of ripe grain. I wear my oldest clothes, and how old they are it is now quite impossible to say, but they are delicious to my body, and barbed wire can do them no harm whatever. I have seen natty anglers, men in new clothes with waders that fitted them like skin, brogues that would have done credit to any lady's drawing-room, snowy linen, jewellery, buttonholes—one even with his oil bottle in a little bag of chamois leather, as if it had been a watch fresh home from the makers. I have dubbed them carpet-fishermen, but in my heart I knew that they—some of them, most of them—killed more fish than I. The unconventional attire in which the American humorous artist loves to dress his ​Weary Willies is not, then, an essential feature of the good fisherman, but there is no doubt that these exquisites are not common objects of the river bank. There seems to be some subtle relation between ancient clothes and angling, for, though I may go to extremes, I resemble far more the composite which would be obtained by photographing any dozen of anglers than do those immaculate sportsmen. As a class we are uncareful of our appearance, preferring comfort and freedom from anxiety to the neatest exterior, and as a class we suffer accordingly—but do not suffer from—the flouts of the uninstructed.
My own experience, then, is probably typical, and our fraternity is derided, which is not as it should be. Now, like all anglers who do their business in water-meadows, I must needs wear waders, or a rheumatic old age awaits me. Gum boots would be a concession to waggonette prejudices, but gum boots were invented by the devil as a special counterblast to the Second Commandment, and the devil does quite well enough as it is. Waders involve big socks, and big socks can only be worn inside brogues. The result is lumbering, but, after all, gum boots, even if one conceded, are only a shade less bulky. A broad-brimmed hat, again, is essential to comfort in bright as in rainy weather. A stream can only ​be scanned successfully in a broad-brimmed hat. The brim can hardly be too broad; mine might have been sired by an umbrella. But when I carry an umbrella (my hat is not nearly so large, of course, as an umbrella) nobody sniggers, nobody calls, "Come out, I can see your feet!" Yet this admonition is commonly offered me by the waggonetteers. This hat, like the hats of other fishermen, is almost covered with flies; but where else am I to put my flies to dry, now that the front of my fishing coat has no more room for them? Honestly, I can think of no other place which would be at all convenient. I have a few in my trousers, but they got there unintentionally, and when I am fishing they are quite inaccessible. I have no reason to think the trousers a good place for carrying flies. And if a broad-brimmed hat covered with feathers and fur is a risible object, what gaiety should reign in Regent Street during shopping hours! But I have never noticed any excess of it thereabouts at those times. To give an instance of the sort of thing my hat causes otherwise decent people to say, a man once told me that I looked like a boomfood mushroom that had gone into the catch'em-alive-o business. But what, I ask, am I to do? Must I suffer agonies from sunburn and eyestrain that malice may have no vent? I think not.
​Waders—to touch for a moment upon another thing which characterises me only when prepared to angle—induce a certain deliberation of movement. Thus I have been addressed from behind as "old cockalorum" by a cyclist, who passed on his way with a hideous guffaw. The appearance of age, then, is funny. I suppose it is the board schools again. But time was when young Englishmen would not have cackled at the mere simulacrum of venerableness, for I am hardly middle-aged.
So, an object of ridicule, I make my rare encounters with the great intelligent world which lies beyond the bend in the valley (where the main line runs) and comes waggonetting it through my Elysium with a sneer for its cloddish rustics and a cat-call for old cockalorum. But how do these same cloddish rustics greet this side-splitting apparition that is William Caine? Do bucolic hee-haws burst from their large amiable mouths when we meet on the road? Does Sewsan lean shaking on the shoulder of Giles, Hodge, the while, rolling in agonies of mirth beneath the hawthorn? Not so. These folk, though they have never trod Cheapside, have knowledge that does not grow in cities. They are wise in their way—and foolish, doubtless, in their way; but their folly is not a discourteous folly, and their ​wisdom tells them that the things which they do not understand are not necessarily to be derided. And this is a good wisdom.
I find that I have worked myself into something like a heat over this matter of the non-angler's attitude towards fishing costumes. This was not my intention. I am casting stones at a host of good people—kind fathers, devoted mothers, excellent sons, brothers, daughters, sisters, self-denying aunts, bland, tip-bestowing uncles. Because they snigger at an undoubtedly bizarre get-up they are not therefore by me to be censured, for I have done the same. I have been tickled in my time by a golfer's red jacket, but that was before I learned the reason for it. Had I known—as I know now—that it was worn as a danger signal to persons who stroll on links that they may keep out of earshot of the players, had I known this I should have recognised the worth of the coat, and my eyes would have been blind to its comicality. Ignorance lay at the root of my amusement.
In the hope, then, of clearing away a cloud or two from the perception of a few fellow-beings I have written what I have written. I do not hope for much result from my toil, but he is a coward who spares himself trouble on so shabby an excuse. And it may be that someone in some ​future waggonette shall have read this little plaint, and the general merriment shall, by his, be lessened, the general ignorance by him be illuminated. And so—for, fair play to the cockney, he is receptive of ideas—the good seed shall bear fruit, and a day may come when a bean-feast descended from these honest citizens shall see in my grandson, as he goes on his way to fish for the trout which I now put down, not a harmless lunatic, fit target for waggery, but a decent angler, suitably clothed, and shall cry with one voice, not "Get your hair cut!" but "Tight lines!"