The timid venture, on the way back to Nature, of a two-weeks’ sitting on the front stoop of a boarding house in the mountains or at the seashore does not satisfy us now. Bold and daring spirits have even gone to live in the wild woods, and have come back to tell us it was bully. We all know it is great fun to play at being boys again, but for most of us the problem is complicated by our having wives and daughters whom we cannot well put in cold storage during our absence. I know that under the pressure of the need to go back to Nature some have even taken the women with them. I—I—I don’t know about that. It doesn’t look very alluring to me. Mind you, I don’t know a thing about living in the wilderness except what I have read and heard, but as near as I can come to it, there seems to be considerable packing to be done. There’s the canoe in the first place. If I were thinking of going into the woods, I shouldn’t stir a stump unless I had a canoe. But you take one fifteen or eighteen feet long, and carry it about three miles through thick-set timber, and I should say along about the last half of the third mile you’d begin to notice it. You’d have to have some kind of a tent, and even when they’re made of silk, I should think they would make something of a bundle. You’d want your gun and ammunition; you’d want your fishing tackle; you’d need a small ax; you’d have to carry a coffee-pot, a frying-pan, a deep pot, a plate, a knife and fork and cup; you’d need at least one blanket and a rubber sheet of some kind; you’d need to pack your bacon and your flour, and erbswurst, and matches, and quinine, and morphine, and rags for bandages in case—you know—and saccharine, and whisky if there are snakes around, and—oh, yes, tobacco; don’t let me forget tobacco—and, oh, I don’t know what all. No women’s fixings in this partial list, you see. I don’t know. I knew a man that took his wife along with him to the woods—but then, don’t you see, it was on their honeymoon. Oh my! It makes all the difference in the world when you’ve been married ten or fifteen years. Yes, I should say so. I once read a most fascinating series of articles by a woman who had this delightful experience. The intention was to chirrup: “Come on, girls! It’s perfectly elegant!” But she didn’t fool me. I could see that whenever there was anything that was arduous, or tedious, or mussy in the housekeeping line “the gentlemen of the party eagerly volunteered.” Yes. M—hm. I can just see ’em. Mind you, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that a woman in the woods is a darn nuisance. No indeed. Only—Well, I tell you. Her husband may be eager to play Injun, but I don’t believe she would be very keen to play squaw. That is, and “tote fair.”