The streams that run into Lake Superior are alive with trout, and next
summer I propose to go up there and roast until I have so thoroughly
saturated my system with trout that the trout bones will stick out
through my clothes in every direction and people will regard me as a
beautiful toothpick holder.
Still there will be a few left for those who think of going up there.
All I will need will be barely enough to feed Albert Victor and myself
from day to day. People who have never seen a crowned head with a peeled
nose on it are cordially invited to come over and see us during office
hours. Albert is not at all haughty, and I intend to throw aside my
usual reserve this summer also--for the time. P. Wales' son and I will
be far from the cares that crowd so thick and fast on greatness. People
who come to our cedar bark wigwam to show us their mosquito bites, will
be received as cordially as though no great social chasm yawned between
us.
Many will meet us in the depths of the forest and go away thinking that
we are just common plugs of whom the world wots not; but there is where
they will fool themselves.
Then, when the season is over, we will come back into the great
maelstrom of life, he to wait for his grandmother's overshoes and I to
thrill waiting millions from the rostrum with my "Tale of the Broncho
Cow." And so it goes with us all. Adown life's rugged pathway some must
toil on from daylight to dark to earn their meagre pittance as kings,
while, others are born to wear a swallow-tail coat every evening and
wring tears of genuine anguish from their audiences.
They tell some rather wide stories about people who have gone up there
total physical wrecks and returned strong and well. One man said that he
knew a young college student, who was all run down and weak, go up there
on the Brule and eat trout and fight mosquitoes a few months, and when
he returned to his Boston home he was so stout and well and tanned
up that his parents did not know him. There was a man in our car who
weighed 300 pounds. He seemed to be boiling out through his clothes
everywhere. He was the happiest looking man I ever saw. All he seemed
to do in this life was to sit all day and whistle and laugh and trot his
stomach, first on one knee and then on the other.
He said that he went up into the pine forests of the Great Lake region
a broken-down hypochondriac and confirmed consumptive. He had been
measured for a funeral sermon three times, he said, and had never used
either of them. He knew a clergyman named Bray-ley who went up into that
region with Bright's justly celebrated disease. He was so emaciated that
he couldn't carry a watch. The ticking of the watch rattled his bones so
that it made him nervous, and at night they had to pack him in cotton so
that he wouldn't break a leg when he turned over. He got to sleeping
out nights on a bed of balsam and spruce boughs and eating venison and
trout.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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