The angling ground at the Little Falls is annually rented by the proprietors to a couple of men named Joe Paine and Jim Collins, who are the presiding geniuses of the place, and have been such for upwards of twenty years. They pay a rent of seventy dollars per annum, and as they receive from fifty cents to five dollars from every angler who visits them, and as they are occasionally troubled with as many as thirty individuals per day, it may readily be imagined that their income is quite respectable. Some of Collins’ friends allege that he has several thousand dollars stowed away in an old pocket book, which it is his intention to bequeath to a favorite nephew, he himself being a bachelor. The reputation of Jim Collins in this section of country is very extensive, and that this should be the case is not at all strange, for he is a decided original. He is about fifty years of age, measures six feet five inches in height, and the offshoots from the four prongs of his body number _twenty-four_ instead of twenty as in ordinary mortals; I mean by this, that his fingers and toes number no less than twenty-four. Notwithstanding this bountiful supply of fingers and toes, Jim Collins has a great antipathy to useful labor, and is as averse to walking as any other web-footed animal. Fishing and sleeping are his two principal employments; and that he is a judge of good whisky, none of his acquaintance would have the hardihood to doubt. The taking of small fish he considers a business beneath his dignity, and the consequence is that his tackle consists of a miniature bed cord, with a hook and cedar pole to match, and his bait a whole herring. He commonly fishes in a boat, and the dexterity with which he “_Kawallups_” the fish upon his lap is truly astonishing. But if you would see Jim Collins in his glory, wait until about the middle of a June afternoon, after he has pocketed some fifteen dollars, and he is sunning himself, with pipe in mouth, upon the rocks, absorbed in _fishy contemplations_. His appearance at such times is allied to that of a mammoth crane, watching (as he does his cockney brethren of the craft) the movements of a lot of half-fledged water birds. During the fishing season he is generally actively employed, but the remainder of his time he spends about the Little Falls, as if his presence were indispensable to the safe passage of the waters of the Potomac through this narrow gorge. That Jim Collins should have met with many queer mishaps, during a residence of twenty years on the Potomac, may be readily imagined; but we believe, the most unique adventure of which he has ever been the victim, happened on this wise. The substance of the story is as follows:—