"If you can guide us no better than you cook, God save us all this day week!" And she hurled the contents of her tin plate into Lake Susan W. Pillsbury. Mrs. Doolittle Batt arose: "Come," she said; "it is time we started. What is the name of the first lake we may hope to encounter?" We knew no more than did they, but we said that Lake Gladys Doolittle Batt was the first, hoping to placate that fearsome woman. "Come on, then!" she cried, picking up her carved and varnished mountain staff. Miss Dingleheimer had brought one, too, from the Catskills. So Kitten Brown and I loaded our mule, set him in motion, and drove him forward into the unknown. Where we were going we had not the slightest idea; the margin of the lake was easy travelling, so easy that we never noticed that we had already gone around the lake three times, until Mrs. Batt recognized the fact and turned on us furiously. I didn't know how to explain it, except to say feebly that I was doing it as a sort of preliminary canter to harden and inure the ladies. "We don't need hardening!" she snarled. "Do you understand that!" I comprehended that at once. But I forced a sickly smile and skipped forward in the wake of my mule, with something of the same abandon which characterizes the flight of an unwelcome dog. In the terrified ear of Kitten I voiced my doubts concerning the prospects of a pleasant journey. We marched in the following order: Arthur, the heavily laden mule, led; then came Kitten Brown and myself, all hung over with stew-pans, shotguns, rifles, cartridge-belts, ponchos, and the toilet reticules of the ladies; then marched the Reverend Dr. Jones, and, in order, filing behind her, Miss Dingleheimer, Mrs. Batt, Miss McFadden, and Miss White--the latter in her trained nurse's costume and wearing a red cross on her sleeve--an idea of Mrs. Batt, who believed in emergency methods. Mrs. Batt also bore a banner, much interfered with by the foliage, bearing the inscription: EQUAL RIGHTS! EUGENICS OR EXTERMINATION! After a while she shouted: "Guide! Here, you may carry this banner for a while! I'm tired." Kitten and I took turns with it after that. It was hard work, particularly as one by one in turn they came up and hung their parasols and shopping reticules all over us. We plodded forward like a pair of moving department stores, not daring to shift our burdens to Arthur, because we had already stuffed into the panniers of that simple and dignified animal all our collecting boxes, cyanide jars, butterfly nets, note-books, reels of piano wire, thermometers, barometers, hydrometers, stereometers, aeronoids, adnoids--everything, in fact, that guides are not supposed to pack into the woods, but which we had smuggled unbeknown to those misguided ones we guided.