It was ten years ago, and the winds and fallen leaves of as many autumns have scattered and covered the gray heap. If it was only last year, you fancy that the smell of fire still lingers in the brands. How vividly return to you the anxious deliberation with which the site was chosen with a view to all attainable comfort and convenience, and the final satisfaction that followed the establishment of this short-lived home, short-lived but yet so much a home during its existence. Nothing contributed so much to make it one as the camp-fire. How intently you watched its first building and lighting, how labored for its maintenance with awkwardly-wielded axe, how you inhaled the odors of its cookery and essayed long-planned culinary experiments with extemporized implements, over its beds of coals, and how you felt the consequent exaltation of triumph or mortification of failure. All these come back to you, and the relighting of the fire in the sleepy dawn, the strange mingling of white sunlight and yellow firelight when the sun shot its first level rays athwart the camp, the bustle of departure for the day's sport, the pleasant loneliness of camp-keeping with only the silent woods, the crackling fire, and your thoughts for company; the incoming at nightfall and the rekindling of the fire, when the rosy bud of sleeping embers suddenly expanded into a great blossom of light whose petals quivered and faded and brightened among the encircling shadows of the woods. You laugh again at the jokes that ran around that merry circle and wonder again and again at the ingenuity with which small performances were magnified into great exploits, little haps into strange adventure, and with which bad shots and poor catches were excused. At last came breaking camp, the desolation of dismantling and leave-taking. How many of you will ever meet again? How many of those merry voices are stilled forever, from how many of those happy faces has the light of life faded? Who lighted this camp-fire? Years have passed since it illumined the nightly gloom of the woods, for moss and lichens are creeping over the charred back-log. A green film is spread over the ashes, and thrifty sprouts are springing up through them. You know that the campers were tent-dwellers, for there stand the rows of rotten tent pins inclosing a rusty heap of mould that once was a fragrant couch of evergreens inviting tired men to rest,--or you know they spent their nights in a shanty, for there are the crumbling walls, the fallen-in roof of bark which never again will echo song or jest.