I’ll tell you how it was. When we got to Temple Camp, I said I was going to start a new up-to-date hike with all improvements. I said it was going to be so crazy that all the other hikes would have a lot of sense compared to it. Even I wrote a proclamation and tacked it up on the bulletin-board outside of Administration Shack, calling for volunteers absolutely positively for not more than one day’s service--maybe two days. It said that any one who was interested should call on Roy Blakeley at Silver Fox Cabin and that if I wasn’t there they should hunt around for me. Because most always if I’m not in one place, I’m in another. I’m sure to be somewhere. It said if they were interested they were lucky. Of course, the first one to come up was Pee-wee Harris. He didn’t have far to come, because his patrol bunks in the next cabin to ours. He’s the head chip of the Chipmunks. He’s the one that had the law of supply and demand passed, especially demand. He’s a nice little scout, only he hasn’t got a voice to fit his size. His voice is a large thirty-six--it was made for a couple of giants. If there was a volcano going you couldn’t even hear it on account of Pee-wee. Right away he wanted to know all about the hike. “When is it going to be and where is it going to be to?” he wanted to know. “It’s not going to be _to_, it’s going to be _from_,” I told him. “And there are going to be only four Scouts in it--maybe six or seven. It’s going to start to-morrow morning at about three o’clock in the afternoon if it’s a pleasant evening and you’re not going to be in it. So you can see how good it’s going to be.” “What’s the name of it?” he wanted to know. Because all our crazy hikes have names. “It’s named the table d’hote hike,” I said, “and I got the idea of it from a grab-bag. It’s got a little of all our other hikes mixed into it; they’re going to be all separated together.” He said, “What do you want to call it the table d’hote hike for? Don’t you know that’s a kind of a dinner? You’re crazy! Anyway, how can a hike be _from_ a place? It’s got to be _to_ a place. You can’t come from a place till you go to it first, can you?” He was starting to shout--you know how he does. “Sure, doesn’t mince-meat come from an animal called a mince?” I said to him. “This hike is going to start from somewhere else and go to another place. As long as two places are separated there can be a hike. Anybody that knows geometry can do that. If two places are mixed into one, there can’t be any hike--that’s a fundamental proposition.” “You don’t know what fundamental means,” he yelled. “It’s derived from the word _fun_,” I told him, “and that’s my middle name. _Mental_ means the opposite from _physical_--you learn that in the second grade. Mental means in your mind. Fundamental means fun in your mind. Ask me another.” “Are you going to tell me about the hike or not?” the kid shouted. “How can I make up my mind if I want to go on it if I don’t know what it is?”