old Governor Stuyvesant, and come right home if you catch a
cold; and wait at the first camp till the other things come, and (in a
whisper) keep away from that horrid red Indian with the knife, and never
fail to let every one know who you are, and write regularly, and don't
forget to take your calomel Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, alternating
with Peruvian bark Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and squills on
Sunday, except every other week, when he should devote Tuesdays,
Fridays, and Sundays to rhubarb and catnip tea, except in the full
moon, when the catnip was to be replaced with graveyard bergamot and the
squills with opodeldoc in which an iron nail had been left for a week.

So Henry was embraced, Rolf was hand-shaken, Quonab was nodded at,
Skookum was wisely let alone, and the trim canoe swung from the dock.
Amid hearty cheers, farewells, and "God speed ye's" it breasted the
flood for the North.

And on the dock, with kerchief to her eyes, stood the mother, weeping to
think that her boy was going far, far away from his home and friends in
dear, cultured, refined Albany, away, away, to that remote and barbarous
inaccessible region almost to the shore land of Lake Champlain.

Chapter 58. Back to Indian Lake

Young Van Cortlandt, six feet two in his socks and thirty-four inches
around the chest, was, as Rolf long afterward said, "awful good raw
material, but awful raw." Two years out of college, half of which had
been spent at the law, had done little but launch him as a physical
weakling and a social star. But his mental make-up was more than good;
it was of large promise. He lacked neither courage nor sense, and the
course he now followed was surely the best for man-making.

Rolf never realized how much a farmer-woodman-canoeman-hunter-camper had
to know, until now he met a man who did not know anything, nor dreamed
how many wrong ways there were of doing a job, till he saw his new
companion try it.

There is no single simple thing that is a more complete measure of one's
woodcraft than the lighting of a fire. There are a dozen good ways and
a thousand wrong ones. A man who can light thirty fires on thirty
successive days with thirty matches or thirty sparks from flint and
steel is a graduated woodman, for the feat presupposes experience of
many years and the skill that belongs to a winner.

When Quonab and Rolf came back from taking each a load over the first
little portage, they found Van Cortlandt ge