Don leaned on his breech-loader and looked at his brother. “That settles two things, Bert,” said he. “One is that we have all been mistaken in supposing that moccasins are not poisonous; and the second is, that one must not put implicit faith in everything he sees in books. Only yesterday I was reading in my natural history that a scorpion, ‘if surrounded by a circle of fire so that it cannot escape, will turn and sting itself through the head, this being the only companion of man in suicide.’ This little incident proves that man has other companions in suicide, doesn’t it?” Besides these disagreeable and dangerous inhabitants of the lake, there are others in the shape of alligator-gars and turtles. The latter have bills like parrots, and grow so large and heavy that it takes two men to lift one of them. A gar is a long, slender fish, and but for its color, might be taken for a gigantic pickerel. It is sometimes found eight feet in length. People say they are harmless, but a timid person would not care to trust one too far after looking at its mouthful of teeth. The boys have two canoes and one sail-boat in the lake. The boat was built in St. Louis, and a steamer brought it to the landing, where Don and Bert took charge of it and navigated it to the wharf by way of the Pass, which connects the lake with the river. This Pass was for a long time blocked up by a levee to keep the waters of the river from overflowing the low lands about the lake. During the war it was cut by the Union forces, and the gunboats came down through the lake and entered Coldwater and Tallahatchee rivers, in the effort to get behind the strong fortifications at Haines’s Bluff.