After thus slowly sweeping the horizon, to note, for the tenth time, perhaps, the impressive character of the scenery, whose everywhere intermingling beauty and grandeur he was never tired of contemplating, Claud withdrew his gaze, and turned his attention to the more immediate object of his excursion. After a few moments spent in regulating his hook and line, he strung his angle-rod, and threw out to see whether he could succeed in tempting, at that unfavorable hour, the fickle trout from their watery recesses. But all in vain the attempt. Not a trout was seen stirring the water at the surface, or manifesting his presence around the hook beneath; and all the endeavors which the tantalized angler made, by changing the bait, and throwing the line in different directions around him, proved, for the next hour, equally fruitless. While he was thus engaged, intently watching his line, each moment expecting that the next must bring him a bite, one of those peculiar, subdued, but far-reaching sounds, which are made by the grazing of the oar against the side of the boat in rowing, occasionally greeted his ear from some point to the south of him; though, for a while, nothing was to be seen to indicate by whom the sounds were produced. Soon, however, a man in a canoe, who had been coasting, unseen, along the indentures of the shore, and whom Claud instantly recognized as Phillips, the hunter already named, shot round a neighboring point, and, in a few minutes more, was at his side. “Well, what luck?” cheerily exclaimed Phillips, a keen, hawk-eyed, self-possessed looking man, with a round, compact, and sinewy frame. “What luck to-day, young man?” “None whatever,” replied Claud, with an air of disappointment. “I suppose so, unless you began before ten o’clock.” “But why did you suppose so?” “O, I knew it from my knowledge of human nature,” said the hunter, humorously. “Trout are very much like other folks, only a great deal more sensitive to heat. Now, you don’t see men, who are well fixed under a cool shade in a sweltering hot day, very anxious to run out bare-headed in the sun, when there is no call for it; much less, then, the trout, that can’t bear the sun and heat at all. Though there are, probably, a ton of them within a stone’s throw of us, not one will come out with this bright sun; they are lying behind the rocks and old logs at the bottom, and won’t begin to circulate these three hours.” “And are you not a-going to try them?”