Spring, poisons and blackens
the stream with chemicals, bark and ooze. The land has been brought
into market, and every acre eagerly bought up by actual settlers. The
once fine covers and thickets are converted into fields thickly dotted
with blackened stumps. And, to crown the desolation, heavy laden trains
of "The Pine Creek and Jersey Shore R.R." go thundering almost hourly
over the very spot where stood our camp by Poplar Spring.

Of course, this is progress; but, whether backward or forward, had
better be decided sixty years hence. And, just what has happened to the
obscure valley of Marsh Creek, is happening today, on a larger scale,
all over the land. It is the same old story of grab and greed. Let us
go on the "make" today, and "whack up" tomorrow; cheating each other
as villainously as we may, and posterity be damned. "What's all the
w-u-u-rld to a man when his wife is a widdy?"

This is the moral: From Maine to Montana; from the Adirondacks to
Alaska; from the Yosemite to the Yellowstone, the trout-hog, the
deer-wolf, the netter, the skin-hunter, each and all have it their own
way; and the law is a farce--only to be enforced where the game has
vanished forever. Perhaps the man-child is born who will live to write
the moral of all this--when it is too late.

CHAPTER VII
More Hints On Cooking, With Some Simple Receipts--Bread, Potatoes,
Soups, Stews, Beans, Fish, Meat, Venison

We may live without friends, we may live without books,
But civilized man cannot live without cooks.

IT is probably true that nothing connected with outdoor life in camp
is so badly botched as the cooking. It is not through any lack of the
raw material, which may be had of excellent quality in any country
village. It is not from lack of intelligence or education, for the men
you meet in the woods, as outers or sportsmen, are rather over than
under the average in these respects. Perhaps it is because it has been
dinned into our ears from early childhood, that an appetite, a healthy
longing for something good to eat, a tickling of the palate with
wholesome, appetizing food, is beneath the attention of an aesthetic,
intellectual man. Forgetting that the entire man, mental and physical,
depends on proper aliment and the healthy assimilation thereof; and
that a thin, dyspeptic man can no more keep up in the struggle of life,
than the lightning express can make connections, drawn by a worn out
locomotive.

I have never been able to g