ttract
rain in dry spells make a mistake. They try the old-fashioned Methodist
way of praying for it, or the new scientific way of shooting dynamite
bombs off and trying to blast it out of the heavens; when, as a matter
of fact, the best plan would be to send for me and get me to go camping
in the arid district. It would then rain heavily and without cessation.

It is a fine thing to talk about the perfumed and restful bed of balsam
boughs, and the crackle of the campfire at dusk, and the dip in the
mirrored bosom of the pellucid lake at dawn--old Emerson Hough does all
that to perfection; but these things assume a different aspect when it
rains. There are three conditions in life when any latent selfishness in
a man's being, however far down it may be buried ordinarily, will come
surging to the surface--when he is courting a girl against strong
opposition; when he is playing a gentleman's game of poker, purely for
sociability; and when he is camping out and it rains. Before a man makes
up his mind that he will take a girl to be his wife he should induce her
to go in surf bathing and see how she looks when she comes out; and
before he makes up his mind that he will take a man to be his best
friend he should go camping with him in the rainy season--the answer in
both cases being that then he won't do either one.

I remember going camping once with a man who before that had appeared to
be all that one could ask in the way of a chosen comrade; but after we
had spent four days cooped up together in an eight-by-ten tent that was
built with sloping shoulders, like an Englishman's overcoat, listening
to the sough of the wind through the wet pine trees without, and dodging
the streams of water that percolated through the dripping roof within, I
could think of more than seven thousand things about that man that I
cordially disliked.

His whiskers gradually became the most distasteful of all to me. Either
he hadn't brought a razor along or it was too wet for shaving--or
something; and his whiskers grew out, and they were bristly and red in
color, which was something I had not suspected before. As I sat there
with the little rivulets running down the back of my neck and the rust
forming on my amalgam fillings and mold on my shoes and mushrooms
sprouting under my hatband, it seemed to me that he had taken an unfair
advantage of me by having red whiskers. Viewed through the drizzle they
appeared to be the reddest, the most inflamm