no
one but Eddie could have taken them at all.

By the next morning, after a night of sorrow--for my face always pained
and itched worse when everybody was in bed and still, with nothing to
soothe me but the eternal drip, drip from the boughs and from the eaves
of the tent--the swelling was still further reduced, and I felt able to
travel. And I wish to add here in all seriousness that whatever may be
your scruples against the use of liquors, don't go into the woods
without whisky--rye or Scotch, according to preference. Alcohol, of
course, is good for poison ivy, but whisky is better. Maybe it is
because of the drugs that wicked men are said to put into it. Besides,
whisky has other uses. The guides told us of one perfectly rigid person
who, when he had discovered that whisky was being included in his camp
supplies, had become properly incensed, and commanded that it be left at
home. The guides had pleaded that he need not drink any of it, that they
would attend to that part of what seemed to them a necessary camp duty,
but he was petrified in his morals, and the whisky remained behind.

Well, they struck a chilly snap, and it rained. It was none of your
little summer landscape rains, either. It was a deadly cold, driving,
drenching saturation. Men who had built their houses on the sand, and
had no whisky, were in a bad fix. The waves rose and the tents blew
down, and the rigid, fossilized person had to be carried across an
overflowed place on the back of a guide, lifting up his voice meanwhile
in an effort to convince the Almighty that it was a mistake to let it
rain at this particular time, and calling for whisky at every step.

It is well to carry one's morals into the woods, but if I had to leave
either behind, I should take the whisky.

It was a short carry to Lake Pescawah. Beyond that water we carried
again about a quarter of a mile to a lake called Pebbleloggitch--perhaps
for the reason that the Indian who picked out the name couldn't find a
harder one. From Pebbleloggitch we made our way by a long canal-like
stillwater through a land wherein no man--not even an Indian,
perhaps--has ever made his home, for it lies through a weird, lonely
marsh--a sort of meadow which no reaper ever harvested, where none but
the wild moose ever feeds.

We were nearing the edge of the unknown now. One of the guides, Del, I
think, had been through this stillwater once before, a long time ago. At
the end of it, he knew, lay th