There is this in favor of taking ’em along: Not every man can cook. I know that out there in the forest, when you make camp as the shadows lengthen after a long day’s tramp, when every muscle aches, but aches with glad fatigue; after a day in which your lungs have drunk in the pure air thinly fragrant with the vague odors that the glazed leaves distill, as it were offering incense to the god of day; when you have quenched your thirst from a spring in the bottom of whose earthen bowl the sands are reeling and staggering in the delirium of glee; when you have hearkened to the wild beauty of some unknown bird-call echoing through the lofty Gothic aisles; when the western sky flames into undreamed-of glories and then fades away until the lonely stars come out, I know they say that you can choke down any old mess and relish it. Maybe so. I am as good a hand at eating pancakes as anybody else, but I don’t know about them for every meal and every day; bacon is my favorite vegetable, but there comes a time; fish once a week is all I care for. No. It doesn’t seem alluring to me. They tell me hemlock boughs make a fine mattress. Yes? I know where I can get better for less money. They tell me that sleeping on the ground with the high sky for a ceiling is simply great. If it comes to that, I have slept on the ground, and the morning after I knew exactly where my hips and shoulders were. I don’t mind granddaddy long-legs tracking over my face. They’re kind of interesting. But I have never been able to put away the thought that if it should turn chilly in the night, and some snake should come and crawl in bed with me, and smuggle his cool slimy body down my back, it would probably break my rest. I shouldn’t fancy it, I’m positive. I tell you. I compromised the matter thus last summer. I got back to Nature—part the way. Not so far though as to get out of touch with the milkman. I had things cooked to suit me; I slept high and dry upon a Christian bed, and yet I wasn’t indoors a minute of the time the whole enduring summer. And I’m never going to be another summer under a wooden roof if I know how to help it. I’ll tell you about it if you like. There were five of us that wanted to live in the outdoor air for twenty-four hours out of every twenty-four. There was the Honest Man who went to gainful business every day; there was the Lazy Man who didn’t do one tap the summer long, though often besought to do so, who now takes his pen in hand to drop you these few lines; there was the Honest Man’s wife; and there were the Lazy Man’s Wife, and his growing Daughter.