camp that would enrage a woodsman, unless the irresistibly funny side of
it made him laugh his inward laugh that seldom reaches the surface.

To live for a while in the wild strengthens the muscles of your mind as
well as of your body. Flabby thoughts and flabby muscles depart together
and are replaced by enthusiasm and vigor of purpose, by strength of limb
and chest and back. To _have_ seems not so desirable as to _be_. When
you have once come into sympathy with this world of the wild--which
holds our cultivated, artificial world in the hollow of its hand and
gives it life--new joy, good, wholesome, heartfelt joy, will well up
within you. New and absorbing interests will claim your attention. You
will breathe deeper, stand straighter. The small, petty things of life
will lose their seeming importance and great things will look larger and
infinitely more worth while. You will know that the woods, the fields,
the streams and great waters bear wonderful messages for you, and,
little by little, you will learn to read them.

The majority of people who visit the up-to-date hotels of the
Adirondacks, which their wily proprietors call camps, may think they see
the wild and are living in it. But for them it is only a big
picnic-ground through which they rush with unseeing eyes and whose
cloisters they invade with unfeeling hearts, seemingly for the one
purpose of building a fire, cooking their lunch, eating it, and then
hurrying back to the comforts of the hotel and the gayety of hotel life.

[Illustration: One can generally pass around obstructions like this on
the trail.]

At their careless and noisy approach the forest suddenly withdraws
itself into its deep reserve and reveals no secrets. It is as if they