I suppose that cooking by a camp-fire is the extreme of picturesqueness. It is also mighty hard upon the back, to say nothing of its blinding you with smoke, and frying the grease out of your face, even after you have learned that it isn’t really necessary to have a conflagration big enough to melt the nose off the coffee-pot, but that a cupful of live coals and a tiny bunch of twigs will do the trick. You have to stand over such a fire to keep it going, and when it rains it is the deuce and all. So we had a blue-flame oil-stove with an oven, and had everything cooked in the highest style known to the art, just as it was before we started on our way back to Nature. There was just one thing the women missed. Endless hot water laid on. Their heaviest burden was to remember “the dying woman’s advice.” Don’t you know what that is? “Sally,” she whispered with her latest breath, “always put on the dish-water before you sit down to your victuals.” But if the Lazy Man could not bring his mind to penning deathless Literatoor, he could at least tote water from the lake, so it wasn’t so bad after all. The need of cooking was great indeed. In no spirit of carping criticism I desire to say that I have seen the Honest Man, many and many’s the time, wolf down six big potatoes at a meal and other things accordingly. We others did our feeble best, but we never quite compassed that. I did eat six ears of green corn once, but you must remember that they were right off the vines, as you might say, and you know how good green corn is when it’s fresh.