I had just arisen from the breakfast table, when the pilot of the boat informed me that he was about to be delayed for two hours, and that there was a fine trout stream a little farther on, which I might investigate. I immediately hailed a couple of my travelling companions, and with our rods in prime order, we all started for the unknown stream. Owing to a huge rock that lay on the margin of the river, we were compelled to make an extensive circuit over a number of brier-covered hills, and we found the bed of our pilot’s trout brook without a particle of water. What aggravated our miserable condition was the intense heat of the sun, which shot its fiery arrows into our very brains. In about an hour, however, we succeeded in reaching the Mississippi once more, and there, comfortably seated in the shadow of a bluff, we threw out our lines and awaited the arrival of the boat. We happened to be in the vicinity of a deep hole, out of which we brought five black bass, weighing three and four pounds apiece. We did not actually capture a single trout, but the sight of one immense fellow that I _lost_ almost brought upon me a fit of sickness. Something very heavy had seized my hook, and after playing it for some minutes I was about to land it, when I saw that it was a trout, (it must have weighed some three pounds,) but making a sudden leap, it snapped my line, and was, like a great many objects in this world, entirely out of my reach; and then I was the victim of a loud and long laugh. The only thing that kept me from falling into a settled melancholy was the incident which immediately followed. When the boat came along, a Frenchman who was a passenger, and happened to have a canoe floating at the stern, volunteered his services to take us on board the steamer. Knowing that my friends had never been in a canoe before, I would not embark with them, and in about two minutes I had the _pleasure_ of seeing them capsized, and after they had become completely soaked, of seeing them rescued from all danger, minus the three fine bass which they had taken. This feat was performed in the presence of quite a number of ladies, and to the tune of as satisfactory a laugh as I ever enjoyed.