the day the Hardware Man presented numerous and cogent reasons why we should not spend another night in camp, and just before sundown we struck the trail back to the cabin. After that we were content to make daily excursions, returning to the cabin at night. Camp life is delightful when proper provision has been made for comfort; otherwise, it is a delusion and a snare. We had not outfitted as we should, and our guide either did not know how to make good our deficiencies or was too lazy to undertake the job. There is a deal of poetry about tent-dwelling, and not infrequently that is all. It is possible to have a tent that will not leak, pitched so that a heavy rain will not turn your sleeping place into a pond; a bough-bed so constructed that the boughs do not poke you in the ribs all night; a commissary department that allows some little variety in the bill of fare and a cook who can at least boil potatoes. This, we say, is possible, and these desirable features are sometimes actualities. When they are, life is “one grand, sweet song.” But there are worse experiences than returning after a day’s tramp, tired and hungry, to find awaiting you an easy chair, a well-cooked meal and a comfortable bed under the shelter of a roof. This outing was in the days before “jacking for deer” had become not only illegal but entirely unethical. The Preacher and Frank, with the guide, tramped one afternoon to a little lake some four miles away for the purpose of floating for deer that night. As it is useless to go on such a quest when the moon is in the sky, and that luminary had fixed upon ten o’clock as the hour for retiring that night, a fire was kindled on the hill-side, well back from the water, and the hunters waited upon the slow setting of the moon. Many questions of more or less importance were discussed and, at last, Frank said to the Preacher, “Have you ever read ‘Robert Elsmere’?” “Yes,” answered the Preacher. “Why do you ask?” “Well, Pastor -------- advised me not to read it. He said he had preached on the book twice, and he had never read it.” The Preacher chuckled and then roared, until the guide growled, “You’ll scare all the deer out of the lake and over the mountain if you make so much noise.” Possibly it was the Preacher’s vociferous hilarity that explains why we “jacked” around the shores of the lake that night for two hours without sighting anything more animated than a dead stump. The Preacher was comparatively young then and had not learned that the less we know about a matter the more unrestrained and cocksure we may be in discussing it.