At Joe’s you could buy all things necessary to support life from ham to hairpins, including Canadian tobacco, which needs a protective tariff if ever anything does in this world. Not because it is a weakling though. It biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder. Funny thing about that Canadian smoking tobacco. Sometimes it puts you in mind of sauerkrout, and sometimes it puts you in mind of boneset. I don’t think it is quite as bitter as boneset, though. Shelter, and food, and water and tobacco being thus accounted for, there remains another prime necessity of life, and that is, sleep. I don’t believe there is one person in a hundred that knows the real luxury of sleep. Consider the uncounted hordes that live in terror of “night air.” Consider the more enlightened that raise their bedroom windows just a trifle, to calk them up as soon as ever it turns a little cool. But even when wide open, a bedroom with a window in it is not by any means the same thing as a tent to sleep in, a tent by the lakeside, its front all flaring open, and its sides and top working like bellowses with the breeze. We had regular wire springs and to the wooden frames we nailed pieces of 2 × 4 for legs. On these were mattresses and bedclothes, plenty of them. For when we read of city folk dying of sunstroke and rolling off their roofs where they had gone to get a mouthful of the lifeless air, robbed of its ozone before it reached them, we were snuggling under one and sometimes two pairs of blankets. And then, I had the pleasure (a small and tepid pleasure you may think it, but very real to me) of trying to prop my eyelids open every night, as I lay stretched out upon my bed, till I could thrust my hand out between the sidewall and the baseboard, and feel the glossy leaves of the cool grapevine, and try to unkink a tendril before I lost consciousness. Sometimes I couldn’t get that far. We’d stay up till all hours, nine and even ten o’clock, fighting off sleep. It was a nightly problem with us which we’d rather do, go to bed and get that lovely sleep, or stay awake a minute or two longer staring at the “friendship fire.”