vets the experience of the camp comes down to primitive conditions of
dress and equipment. There are guides and porters to carry the blankets
for beds, the raw provisions, and the camp equipage; and the motley
party of the temporarily decivilized files into the woods, and begins,
perhaps by a road, perhaps on a trail, its exhilarating and weary march.
The exhilaration arises partly from the casting aside of restraint,
partly from the adventure of exploration; and the weariness, from the
interminable toil of bad walking, a heavy pack, and the grim monotony
of trees and bushes, that shut out all prospect, except an occasional
glimpse of the sky. Mountains are painfully climbed, streams forded,
lonesome lakes paddled over, long and muddy "carries" traversed. Fancy
this party the victim of political exile, banished by the law, and a
more sorrowful march could not be imagined; but the voluntary hardship
becomes pleasure, and it is undeniable that the spirits of the party
rise as the difficulties increase.

For this straggling and stumbling band the world is young again: it has
come to the beginning of things; it has cut loose from tradition, and
is free to make a home anywhere: the movement has all the promise of a
revolution. All this virginal freshness invites the primitive instincts
of play and disorder. The free range of the forests suggests endless
possibilities of exploration and possession. Perhaps we are treading
where man since the creation never trod before; perhaps the waters of
this bubbling spring, which we deepen by scraping out the decayed leaves
and the black earth, have never been tasted before, except by the wild
denizens of these woods. We cross the trails of lurking animals,--paths
that heighten our sense of seclusion from the world. The hammering of
the infrequent woodpecker, the call of the lonely bird, the drumming
of the solitary partridge,--all these sounds do but emphasize the
lonesomeness of nature. The roar of the mountain brook, dashing over its
bed of pebbles, rising out of the ravine, and spreading, as it were, a
mist of sound through all the forest (continuous beating waves that
have the rhythm of eternity in them), and the fitful movement of the
air-tides through the balsams and firs and the giant pines,--how these
grand symphonies shut out the little exasperations of our vexed life! It
seems easy to begin life over again on the simplest terms. Probably
it is not so much the desire of the cong