If there were no such thing as habit, life would be nothing but a perpetual beginning and recommencing over and over again. All that we do or think marks us with its imprint, leaving behind it a tendency—a tendency towards repetition is the beginning of habit, and because of it we can get the camp habit just as we can get any other habit. The instinct to repeat our camping out of doors gradually grows stronger. At last, scarcely conscious of the existence of the demand, we have come to feel that we cannot pass our holiday in any other way. The first camping experience stands out in bold relief because it is new. As we live into it, its first impressions are lost. And it is at this moment, if we are made of the right stuff and have in us the right longings and needs, that we begin to have the camp habit.

Just as with people, maybe we scarcely realize how much it means to us. But let us stop to think about it, let us give this good camp habit a full opportunity if we can in our lives. Already the camp habit has become a need, almost an imperious demand. We feel that once in so often it must be satisfied and in the splendid grip of this good habit we make way for it. Never let us become dull to any of its values. Never let us forget, however shot with black and white it may be, even gray at times, the difficulties of camping may make life seem—never let us forget the treasures that it pours in upon us and the ways in which the camp habit serves us.

It is a sad and a great truth which perhaps women and girls have not yet fully realized, that the whole manner of our body, of our souls is controlled by the goodness, or the badness of our habits, our moral character, our physical temperament. There is a sort of natural medicine, raising what is not good inevitably up to what is better. That is what the camp habit does for us, raising what is not healthy, not strong, not sane, not joyous, not self-reliant up to what is strong, healthy, joyous and full of self-control. Is not this alone sufficient reason for giving the camp habit once in so often full sway in our lives? What better could we do than, in order to re-establish ourselves, to claim again the wise big relationships of out-of-doors and a thousand and one little and big friends whom we can find there?

Bad habits are thieves, for they take away our energies, our abilities, our joys. And the indoor habit is a thief. It shortens life, it takes away from health, it saps energies, it dilutes joys, it makes foggy heads and punky morals. The sane girl will get out of doors every opportunity instead of spending her time in a hot room, playing cards, or eating stuff that is not fit to put into the human stomach or flirting with boys, who if they are the right sort of boys, would much prefer, too, to be out of doors. Good habits, like this camp habit are benefactors, great philanthropists; they strengthen us and they give us more energy. They increase our ability, they multiply our joys compound interest-wise. Good habits are careful accountants and every day or every year as it may be, they put the interest of strength, of intelligence, of joy, in our hands to be used as we think best. The camp habit wisely used, obliges us to open our eyes and see life more truly. It obliges us to lift our own weight, take our part in things, that part may be washing dishes or it may be turning griddle cakes,—it forces us to know ourselves better and it gives us more power to control ourselves. The camp habit—get it quickly if you haven’t it already—assures us of good health and success where, for example, the indoor habit has brought us nothing but ill health and failure. It is a habit worth while getting, isn’t it?

A good many of us know ourselves, such as we are, pretty well and we feel that we do not want to know ourselves any better. Things are bad enough as they are. Yet if we can’t have a more intimate knowledge of ourselves, if we don’t arrange our lives better, if we don’t plan for the future more carefully, what are our lives likely to be like when the curtain goes down? How are we ever going to take the proverbial ounce of prevention if we are not certain to a fraction what it is we must prevent? Camp is a splendid opportunity to think a little about those things of which we have been afraid to think. It is a good opportunity to meditate, a friendly world to which to go to know ourselves better. It is an old saying that the first step towards the recovery of health is to know yourself ill. In that great out-of-door world which our American camp life represents it is easier to find ourselves morally than it is indoors, we get more help for one thing. It is almost an instinct in great trouble or bewilderment or difficulty to escape into the out-of-door world, to get back to earth and to ask from the great mother those counsels we hear dimly or indifferently indoors.

Wisdom will not be found in one camp holiday or in fifty or in a lifetime even. But it is rather strange, isn’t it, that the person whom we know least is so frequently ourselves? We know very well that the most learned man or woman is not the one whose head is stuffed with information, is not necessarily the conspicuous or famous man or woman, but is, rather, the human being who knows himself. And this human being may be not our teacher, but our janitor or a nurse who takes care of the baby or that fellow who seems so simple, the guide who has our camping trip in charge. Indeed, there is scarcely a class of men who seem in better control of themselves and who have a better working knowledge of themselves and others than the highest type of guide. All the associations of that great out-of-door life, its demands, its privations, its sudden needs, its great silence, its dumb creatures, its wonderful beauty, have taught the man of the woods a wisdom no school, no university, can offer merely through its curriculum. We can’t realize too early how well worth while that wisdom is for every girl to have. Not a thing of book learning, but a power that makes one truthful with oneself, eager to acknowledge what is bad and to change it. Frank, courageous, tried in commonplace wisdom, and with a knowledge of other human beings.

There is one kind of idea—and it is worth while meditating in the woods on the leverage power of even one very little idea—that can always be found out of doors. I mean a healthful idea, the kind of thought that makes us stand straighter, that strengthens the muscles of our backbone, that makes us act as if we were what we wish to be. There is no other force in the world that can so readily straighten out a crooked boy or a crooked girl as this same Dr. Dame Nature.