it had been fairly
earned, and if our consciences had any sins on them they had to adjourn
court for that night, any way. The wind rose just as we were losing
consciousness, and we were lulled to sleep by the beating of the surf
upon the shore.

It is always very cold on that lake shore in the night, but we had plenty
of blankets and were warm enough. We never moved a muscle all night, but
waked at early dawn in the original positions, and got up at once,
thoroughly refreshed, free from soreness, and brim full of friskiness.
There is no end of wholesome medicine in such an experience. That
morning we could have whipped ten such people as we were the day before
--sick ones at any rate. But the world is slow, and people will go to
"water cures" and "movement cures" and to foreign lands for health.
Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would restore an Egyptian mummy
to his pristine vigor, and give him an appetite like an alligator. I do
not mean the oldest and driest mummies, of course, but the fresher ones.
The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and
delicious. And why shouldn't it be?--it is the same the angels breathe.
I think that hardly any amount of fatigue can be gathered together that a
man cannot sleep off in one night on the sand by its side. Not under a
roof, but under the sky; it seldom or never rains there in the summer
time. I know a man who went there to die. But he made a failure of it.
He was a skeleton when he came, and could barely stand. He had no
appetite, and did nothing but read tracts and reflect on the future.
Three months later he was sleeping out of doors regularly, eating all he
could hold, three times a day, and chasing game over mountains three
thousand feet high for recreation. And he was a skeleton no longer, but
weighed part of a ton. This is no fancy sketch, but the truth. His
disease was consumption. I confidently commend his experience to other
skeletons.

I superintended again, and as soon as we had eaten breakfast we got in
the boat and skirted along the lake shore about three miles and
disembarked. We liked the appearance of the place, and so we claimed
some three hundred acres of it and stuck our "notices" on a tree. It was
yellow pine timber land--a dense forest of trees a hundred feet high and
from one to five feet through at the butt. It was necessary to fence our
property or we could not hold it. That is to say, it was necessary to
cu