CAMPING OUT

"Camping out" is becoming merely a name for moving out of one's permanent habitation and dwelling for a few weeks in a well-built lodge, smaller than one's home, but as comfortable and almost as convenient; with tables, chairs and crockery, carpets and curtains, beds with sheets and blankets on real bedsteads, a stove and its full outfit of cooking utensils, wherefrom meals are served in the regular ways of civilization. Living in nearly the same fashion of his ordinary life, except that he wears a flannel shirt and a slouch hat, and fishes a little and loafs more than is his ordinary custom, our "camper" imagines that he is getting quite close to the primitive ways of hunters and trappers; that he is living their life with nothing lacking but the rough edges, which he has ingeniously smoothed away. He is mistaken. In ridding himself of some of its discomforts, he has lost a great deal of the best of real camp life; the spice of small adventure, and the woodsy flavor that its half-hardships and makeshift appliances give it. If one sleeps a little cold under his one blanket on his bed of evergreen twigs, though he does not take cold, he realizes in some degree the discomfort of Boone's bivouac when he cuddled beside his hounds to keep from freezing—and feels slightly heroic. His slumbers are seasoned with dreams of the wild woods, as the balsamic perfume of his couch steals into his nostrils; his companions' snores invade his drowsy senses as the growl of bears, and the thunderous whir of grouse bursting out of untrodden thickets. When he awakes in the gray of early morning he finds that the few hours of sleep have wrought a miracle of rest, and he feels himself nearer to nature when he washes his face in the brook, than when he rinses off his sleepiness in bowl or basin. The water of the spring is colder and has a finer flavor when he drinks it from a birch bark cup of his own making. Tea made in a frying-pan has an aroma never known to such poor mortals as brew their tea in a teapot, and no mill ever ground such coffee as that which is tied up in a rag and pounded with a stone or hatchet-head. A sharpened stick for a fork gives a zest to the bit of pork "frizzled" on as rude a spit and plattered on a clean chip or a sheet of bark, and no fish was ever more toothsome than when broiled on a gridiron improvised of green wands or roasted Indian fashion in a cleft stick.

What can make amends for the loss of the camp-fire, with innumerable pictures glowing and shifting in its heart, and conjuring strange shapes out of the surrounding gloom, and suggesting unseen mysteries that the circle of darkness holds behind its rim? How are the wells of conversation to be thawed out by a black stove, so that tales of hunters' and fishers' craft and adventure shall flow till the measure of man's belief is overrun? How is the congenial spark of true companionship to be kindled when people brood around a stove and light their pipes with matches, and not with coals snatched out of the camp-fire's edge, or with twigs that burn briefly with baffling flame?

But it will not be long before it will be impossible to get a taste of real camping without taking long and expensive journeys, for every available rod of lake shore and river bank is being taken up and made populous with so-called camps, and the comfortable freedom and seclusion of a real camp are made impossible there. One desiring that might better pitch his tent in the back woodlot of a farm than in any such popular resort. This misnamed camping out has become a fashion which seems likely to last till the shores are as thronged as the towns, and the woods are spoiled for the real campers, whom it is possible to imagine seeking in the summers of the future a seclusion in the cities that the forests and streams no longer can give them.

Yet, let it be understood that make-believe camping is better than no camping. It cannot but bring people into more intimate relations with nature than they would be if they stayed at home, and so to better acquaintance with our common mother, who deals so impartially with all her children.