--and to these you should add dried fruit or rice. The best dried fruit is a mixture in equal parts of apricots and prunes. Take an abundance of tea: nothing takes the place of tea; and supply yourself with pepper, salt, sugar, candles, and soap. Your cooking pots should fit the one into the other. These things, with a small frying-pan, an axe (to cut poles for your evening shelter and wood for your fire), a file to sharpen this, and some stout wire hooks by which to hang your pots over the fire, complete, I think, the sum-total of your absolutely necessary impedimenta. § 51 The sedulous, however sage, have little idea how large a part of active life depends on food. To stay-at-homes, who go down to the dining-room when the gong sounds, a meal seems a mere incident of life, an intermission from work, an opportunity for a family chat. The traveller on foot soon learns that a meal is of the most vital importance. Every reader of Nansen's thrilling narrative must have noticed this. Even in Mr Belloc's literary "Path to Rome" one is struck with the intrusion of this unliterary topic, and the more literary "Inland Voyage" of Robert Louis Stevenson is not free from it. While even in that delightful, and delightfully feminine, "An Oberland Chalet," which I have already cited, although the foods were generally cheese or cakes or _petits pains_, and the drinks chocolate or milk or _café au lait_, the mention of edibles and potables is frequent. The importance of a supply of food has so often been borne in upon me that I am inclined to believe that the political community is coæval with the pantry. Even amongst animals, only those form commonwealths which form common stores of food--as the ant and the bee. The pedestrian gains a practical insight into this wide-reaching influence of a storage of food. Not for half-a-dozen hours can he subsist before its importance is impressed upon him by most painful pangs. If, therefore, sedulous sage, you set out on a long hard walk without due provision for the allaying of hunger, you will come to grief. I make no apologies, accordingly, for minute instructions on that topic here. § 52