It was while smarting under these criticisms that the steward one morning in June brought him his letters. One was from Monteith--Class of '9l--a senior when Muggles was a freshman--and was postmarked "Wabacog, Canada," where Monteith owned a lumber mill--and where he ran it himself and everything connected with it from stumpage to scantling. "There is a broad stream that runs into the lake, ... and above the mill there are bass weighing ten pounds, ... and back in the primeval forest bears, ... and now and then a moose--" So ran the letter. Muggles had spread it wide open by this time and was reading it aloud--everybody knowing Monteith--and the group never having any secrets of this kind from each other. "Come up, old chap," the letter continued, "and stay a week--two, if you can work it--and bring Bender, and little Billy and Poddy, and three or four more. The bungalow holds ten. Wire when--I'm now putting things on ice." Muggles looked around the circle and sent interrogatory Marconigrams with his eyebrows. In response Podvine said he'd go, and so did Billy Salters. Bender thought he could come a day or two later--the earning of their daily bread was not an absorbing task with these young gentlemen--their fathers had done that years before. Muggles ran over in his mind the list of his engagements: he was due at Gravesend on the tenth for a week, to play golf; at his aunt's country-seat in Westchester on the eleventh for the same length of time, and on the twelfth he was expected to meet a yacht at Cold Spring Harbor for a cruise up the coast. He had accepted these invitations and had fully intended to keep each and every one. Monteith's letter, however, seemed to come at a time when he really needed a more virile and bracing life than was offered by the others. Here was a chance to redeem his reputation. Lumber camps meant big men doing big things--things reeking with danger, such as falling trees, forest fires and log jams. There might also be hair-breadth escapes in the hunting of big game and the tramping of the vast wilderness. This dressing three times a day and spending the intermediate hours hitting wooden balls, or lounging in a straw chair under a deck awning, had become tiresome. What he needed was to get down to Nature and hug the sod, and if there wasn't any sod then he would grapple with whatever took its place. Muggles dropped his legs to the floor, straightened his back, beckoned to a servant, motioned for a telegraph blank--exertion is tabooed at the Magnolia--untelescoped a gold pencil hooked to his watch-chain and wrote as follows: "Thanks. Coming Tuesday." II