I set out for the nearest skid-way, where the men were gathering, when suddenly I came upon Karl lying at length in a clump of myrtle, with one foot extended upon a rock, and bare, except for a woollen sock that was bound tightly around the instep. What had happened was clear in an instant. The sock was saturated with blood, and a dark, clotted stream stained the foot, and a pool of blood had formed on the surface of the rock. I sat down beside him, and Karl first showed me in his boot a clean cut three inches long, where the axe-blade had entered. Then he unwrapped the sock, and lifting from the wound a quid of pulpy tobacco, he exposed a gash where the skin and shallow flesh lay open to the bone. The flow of blood had nearly ceased, for the tobacco had acted as a styptic; and Karl quickly reapplied it, and again bound the wound tightly with his sock. All the while he acted in a perfectly impersonal manner, as though he were in no way directly concerned in the accident, which was simply a phenomenon of common interest to us both. He betrayed no trace of suffering nor even of annoyance at the discomfort of the mishap; and soon he began to speak of it, in his broken English, with like impersonality. "Fitz-Adams, you know, would take him to camp in the buckboard after dinner, and would see that he got safe to English Centre, where the doctor would dress the wound. That would do very well until he reached Williamsport; but he must go to Williamsport, and that was the worst of it; for it would be several weeks before he could get back to camp, and then, between drunks and the doctor's bills, his savings would be all gone." This taken-for-granted attitude toward riotous living is strikingly characteristic. I have noticed it repeatedly among the men. They speak of past and prospective debauches with the _naïveté_ of callow undergraduates, except that among the lumbermen there is no sense of credit or distinction attaching to vice; it is simply inherent in the order of things. This is by no means a professed creed. Profession, when there is any, is all in the other direction, and is of the nature of the "homage that vice pays to virtue." It is simply in the natural and unpremeditated speech and action of the men that you detect this attitude of mind. The time spent at the camp is, in one aspect of it, a course of training, a cumulative storage of energy, financial and physical, against a future expenditure in the sudden outburst of a grand carouse.