n how real woodmen can
have a hot meal when there is three feet of snow in the woods."

"Hurrah!" shouted Hal. "That will be bully! Come on, Walt, and let's see
your paces."

For the next fifteen minutes the three boys tramped back and forth in
front of the cabin, the shoes clacking merrily amid a running fire of
chaff and comment from Pat. Once Sparrer stepped on one of Upton's shoes
and sent him headlong, to the huge delight of the others. Again Hal did
just what Pat had warned them against, took a short step and tripped
himself up. But at the end of a quarter of an hour they had pretty well
"got the hang of the thing," as Pat expressed it, and were eager to try
it on deep snow.

"There's nothing to it," declared Hal. "I thought there were something
to learn, like skating, but this is a cinch. I could keep it up all
day," and by way of emphasizing his remarks once more tripped himself
up, and sat down abruptly.

"Sure, it's no trick at all," chaffed Walter. "When you can't keep up
sit down, and when you're down stay down. There's nothing to it." For
Hal, forgetting the width of his present underpinning, had no sooner
scrambled to his feet than he had gone down again, because of the
overlapping webs.

The doctor and Mrs. Merriam now joined them, for the latter was an
expert on shoes and had no mind to miss the outing. Pat and the doctor
swung to their backs the packs wherein were the supplies and dishes, and
they were off, the doctor in the lead, Mrs. Merriam next, then Sparrer,
Hal, Upton and Pat in the rear to keep the tenderfeet from straggling
and to pull them out of the snow, he explained.

For a short distance a broken trail was followed. Then the doctor
abruptly swung off among the trees where the snow lay deep and unbroken.
The three novices soon found that progress here was a very different
matter from walking on the comparatively hard surface of the packed
trail. The shoes sank in perhaps a couple of inches and it was necessary
to lift the feet more, to step high, which put more of a strain on the
muscles. Also there was a tendency to step higher than was at all in
good form, and to shorten the stride by so doing, losing the smooth easy
forward roll from the hips.

Still, all things considered, the three novices were doing themselves
proud until in an unguarded moment Hal stepped on the stub of a broken
branch of a fallen tree buried in the snow. It caught in the tail of the
shoe just enough to break