chair beside it indulged in the
"long, long thoughts" which belong to age much more than to youth. Youth
was soundly and audibly sleeping in the tents with no thoughts at all.

The talk that first night around the camp-fire gave us an inside view of
many things about which we were much concerned. The ship question was
the acute question of the hour and we had with us for a few days
Commissioner Hurley, of the Shipping Board, who could give us first-hand
information, which he did to our great comfort.

Our next stop was near Uniontown, Pennsylvania, where for that night we
slept indoors.

On the following day one of the big cars had an accident--the fan broke,
and the iron punctured the radiator. It looked as if we should be
delayed until a new radiator could be forwarded from Pittsburgh. We made
our way slowly to Connellsville, where there was a good garage, but the
best workmen there shook their heads; they said a new radiator was the
only remedy. All four arms of the fan were broken off and there was no
way to mend them. This verdict put Mr. Ford on his mettle. "Give me a
chance," he said, and, pulling off his coat and rolling up his sleeves,
he fell to work. In two hours we were ready to go ahead. By the aid of
drills and copper wire the master mechanic had stitched the severed arms
to their stubs, soldered up the hole in the radiator, and the disabled
car was again in running order.

On August the 31st we made our camp on the banks of a large, clear creek
in West Virginia called Horseshoe Run. A smooth field across the road
from the creek seemed attractive, and I got the reluctant consent of the
widow who owned it to pitch our camp there, though her patch of
roasting-ears near by made her hesitate; she had probably had
experiences with gypsy parties, and was not impressed in our favor even
when I gave her the names of two well-known men in our party. But Edison
was not attracted by the widow's open field; the rough, grassy margin of
the creek suited him better, and its proximity to the murmuring,
eddying, rocky current appealed to us all, albeit it necessitated our
mess-tent being pitched astride a shallow gully, and our individual
tents elbowing one another in the narrow spaces between the boulders.
But wild Nature, when you can manage her, is what the camper-out wants.
Pure elements--air, water, earth--these settle the question; Camp
Horseshoe Run had them all. It was here, I think, that I got my first
view of