a blanket and tried to
sleep, but it was only a partial success. When, by suffocating himself,
he obtained a little relief from insect bites, there were stubs and
knotty roots continually poking themselves among his ribs, or digging
into his backbone.

I have often had occasion to observe that stubs, roots and small
stones, etc., have a perverse tendency to abrade the anatomy of people
unused to the woods. Mr. C.D. Warner has noticed the same thing, I
believe.

On the whole, Jean and the other youngsters behaved very well.
Although they turned out in the morning with red, swollen faces and
half closed eyes, they all went trouting and caught about 150 small
trout between them. They did their level bravest to make a jolly thing
of it; but Jean's attempt to watch a deerlick resulted in a wetting
through the sudden advent of a shower; and the shower drove about all
the punkies and mosquitoes in the neighborhood under our roof for
shelter. I never saw them more plentiful or worse. Jean gave in and
varnished his pelt thoroughly with my "punkie dope," as he called it;
but, too late: the mischief was done. And the second trial was worse to
those youngsters than the first. More insects. More stubs and knots.
Owing to these little annoyances, they arrived at home several days
before their friends expected them--leaving enough rations in camp to
last Old Sile and the writer a full week. And the moral of it is, if
they had fitted themselves for the the woods before going there, the
trip would have been a pleasure instead of a misery.

One other little annoyance I will mention, as a common occurrence
among those who camp out; this is the lack of a pillow. I suppose I
have camped fifty times with people, who, on turning in, were squirming
around for a long time, trying to get a rest for the head. Boots are
the most common resort. But, when you place a boot-leg--or two of
them--under your head, they collapse and make a headrest less than half
an inch thick. Just why it never occurs to people that a stuffing of
moss, leaves, or hemlock browse, would fill out the boot-leg and make a
passable pillow, is another conundrum I cannot answer. But there is
another and better way of making a pillow for camp use, which I will
describe further on.

And now I wish to devote some space to one of the most important
adjuncts of woodcraft, i.e., camps; how to make them and how to make
them comfortable. There are camps and camps. There are camps i