season--would have been most disastrous; while a forest fire like that
of '56 and later ones, would simply have proved fatal.

Reader, if ever you are tempted to make a similar thoughtless,
reckless trip--don't do it.

CHAPTER IX
The Light Canoe And Double Blade--Various Canoes For Various
Canoeists--Reasons For Preferring The Clinker-Built Cedar

THE canoe is coming to the front and canoeing is gaining rapidly in
popular favor, in spite of the disparaging remark that "a canoe is a
poor man's yacht." The canoe editor of Forest and Stream pertinently
says, "we may as properly call a bicycle 'the poor man's express
train'." But, suppose it is the poor man's yacht? Are we to be debarred
from aquatic sports because we are not rich? And are we such weak
flunkies as to be ashamed of poverty? Or to attempt shams and
subterfuges to hide it? For myself, I freely accept the imputation. In
common with nine-tenths of my fellow citizens I am poor--and the canoe
is my yacht, as it would be were I a millionaire. We are a nation of
many millions and comparatively few of us are rich enough to support a
yacht, let alone the fact that not one man in fifty lives near enough
to yachting waters to make such an acquisition desirable--or feasible,
even. It is different with the canoe. A man like myself can live in the
backwoods, a hundred miles from a decent sized inland lake and much
further from the sea coast, and yet be an enthusiastic canoeist. For
instance.

Last July I made my preparations for a canoe cruise and spun out with
as little delay as possible. I had pitched on the Adirondacks as
cruising ground and had more than 250 miles of railroads and buckboards
to take, before launching the canoe on Moose River. She was carried
thirteen miles over the Brown's Tract road on the head of her skipper,
cruised from the western side of the Wilderness to the Lower St. Regis
on the east side, cruised back again by a somewhat different route, was
taken home to Pennsylvania on the cars, 250 miles, sent back to her
builder, St. Lawrence County, N.Y., over 300 miles, thence by rail to
New York City, where, the last I heard of her, she was on exhibition at
the Forest and Stream office. She took her chances in the baggage car,
with no special care and is today, so far as I know, staunch and tight,
with not a check in her frail siding.

Such cruising can only be made in a very light canoe and with a very
light outfit. It was sometimes necessar