ive comforts have been provided. I had never been
in the habit, for instance, of stumbling through several rods of bushes
and tangled vines to get to a wash-bowl that was four miles wide and six
miles long and full of islands and trout, and maybe snapping turtles (I
know there were snapping turtles, for Charlie had been afraid to leave
his shoepacks on the beach for fear the turtles would carry them off),
and I had not for many years known what it was to bathe my face on a
ground level or to brush my teeth in the attitude of prayer. It was all
new and strange, as I have said, and there was no hot water--not even a
faucet--that didn't run, maybe, because the man upstairs was using it.
There wasn't any upstairs except the treetops and the sky, though, after
all, these made up for a good deal, for the treetops feathered up and
faded into the dusky blue, and the blue was sown with stars that were
caught up and multiplied by every tiny wrinkle on the surface of the
great black bowl and sent in myriad twinklings to our feet.

Still, I would have exchanged the stars for a few minutes, for a
one-candle power electric light, or even for a single gas jet with such
gas as one gets when the companies combine and establish a uniform rate.
I had mislaid my tube of dentifrice and in the dim, pale starlight I
pawed around and murmured to myself a good while before I finally called
Eddie to help me.

"Oh, let it go," he said. "It'll be there for you in the morning. I
always leave mine, and my soap and towel, too."

He threw his towel over a limb, laid his soap on a log and faced toward
the camp. I hesitated. I was unused to leaving my things out overnight.
My custom was to hang my towel neatly over a rack, to stand my
toothbrush upright in a glass on a little shelf with the dentifrice
beside it. Habit is strong. I did not immediately consent to this wide
and gaudy freedom of the woods.

"Suppose it rains," I said.

"All the better--it will wash the towels."

"But they will be wet in the morning."

"Um--yes--in the woods things generally are wet in the morning. You'll
get used to that."

It is likewise my habit to comb my hair before retiring, and to look at
myself in the glass, meantime. This may be due to vanity. It may be a
sort of general inspection to see if I have added any new features, or
lost any of those plucked from the family tree. Perhaps it is only to
observe what the day's burdens have done for me in the way of wr