When one has been accustomed to the comforts of civilized life--the small ones, I mean, for they are the only ones that count--the beginning of a wild, free life near to nature's heart begets a series of impressions quite new, and strange--so strange. It is not that one misses a house of solid walls and roof, with stairways and steam radiators. These are the larger comforts and are more than made up for by the sheltering temple of the trees, the blazing campfire and the stairway leading to the stars. But there are things that one does miss--a little--just at first. When we had finished our first evening's smoke and the campfire was burning low--when there was nothing further to do but go to bed, I suddenly realized that the man who said he would be willing to do without all the rest of a house if he could keep the bathroom, spoke as one with an inspired knowledge of human needs. I would not suggest that I am a person given to luxurious habits and vain details in the matter of evening toilet. But there are so many things one is in the habit of doing just about bedtime, which in a bathroom, with its varied small conveniences, seem nothing at all, yet which assume undue proportions in the deep, dim heart of nature where only the large primitive comforts have been provided. I had never been in the habit, for instance, of stumbling through several rods of bushes and tangled vines to get to a wash-bowl that was four miles wide and six miles long and full of islands and trout, and maybe snapping turtles (I know there were snapping turtles, for Charlie had been afraid to leave his shoepacks on the beach for fear the turtles would carry them off), and I had not for many years known what it was to bathe my face on a ground level or to brush my teeth in the attitude of prayer. It was all new and strange, as I have said, and there was no hot water--not even a faucet--that didn't run, maybe, because the man upstairs was using it. There wasn't any upstairs except the treetops and the sky, though, after all, these made up for a good deal, for the treetops feathered up and faded into the dusky blue, and the blue was sown with stars that were caught up and multiplied by every tiny wrinkle on the surface of the great black bowl and sent in myriad twinklings to our feet. Still, I would have exchanged the stars for a few minutes, for a one-candle power electric light, or even for a single gas jet with such gas as one gets when the companies combine and establish a uniform rate. I had mislaid my tube of dentifrice and in the dim, pale starlight I pawed around and murmured to myself a good while before I finally called Eddie to help me. "Oh, let it go," he said. "It'll be there for you in the morning. I always leave mine, and my soap and towel, too."