By that time a lot of Scouts were standing around laughing. Gee whiz, it doesn’t take much to get Pee-wee started. I said, “Do you think a big enterprise like a hike can be started without due thought and consideration--and you needn’t tell me I got those words out of a book, because I know I did. Do you think Christopher Columbus started out to discover Columbus, Ohio, without making all plans and everything? I don’t know what kind of a hike it’s going to be yet. I’ll probably decide yesterday afternoon. And then I’ll pick out who’s going to go on it. I want four fellows and they’ve all got to be crazy.” “They’ll be good and hungry before they get back,” said Pee-wee. “That’s nothing, _you’re_ good and hungry before you start out,” I told him. “You never get hungry, because you’re already that way.” Gee whiz, a meal a minute is that kid’s speed. The reason he never boils his vegetables is he’s afraid they’ll shrink. One night he stayed awake three hours trying to figure out how he could eat more than one meal at a time and after a while he woke up and found his mouth open, so he had to get up and shut it. This isn’t so much of a chapter, anyway I should worry, maybe the next one will be even still worse. CHAPTER II KERFLOP Now I’m going to start writing the next chapter and I’m going to keep writing it till the dinner gong rings, so you can see it’s going to have a good ending. It has a good ending even before it starts. It ends in a rice pudding, but oh boy, wait till you see what the last one ends in. I bet you think I’m a crazy author, hey? Anyway, I have a lot of fun. So now I guess I’ll tell you how my celebrated, world renowned, crazy hikes started. First we got carried away in a railroad car and that was a dandy hike only it wasn’t a hike at all, but it was like one only different. Then four of us had a bee-line hike and went straight to a place on account of a solemn vow that we wouldn’t turn right or left. Then, the next one was a funny-bone hike dedicated to an insane asylum and the next time I go on one like that, I’ll know it--follow your leader, that was it; _oh boy_! Then we had a tangled trail hike where we had to keep turning to the left no matter what--some mixup! We went home by the way of the Cape of Good Hopeless. Then, we had an elastic hike, because it stretched way out. Most of the fellows that read about our hikes like them--no wonder, because they don’t have to go on them. Anyway, that night up at Temple Camp I didn’t think any more about a new kind of a hike, because I couldn’t think of a way to have a table d’hote hike, having all the different kinds of hikes kind of separated together. But anyway, I thought up a good name for that kind of a hike, I’d call it the symposium hike, it’s taken from the word simp and it means a lot of different things together.