life!"

"It is healthful so far as animal life goes," laughed Frank, "but
what about mental life? There would never have been anything
wonderful in the way of inventions--like the wireless, and the
telephone, and the uses of electricity--if mankind had been content
to live and die in the wilds! It is crude, as I said before,
unfinished, out of line with all the decrees of art. I'll take the
city for mine, with its marble buildings, its wonderful art
galleries, its beautiful parks!"

"Say, you mooners!" came a voice from the camp below, "if you've got
done surveying the beautiful black landscape, suppose you come down
to supper?"

The boys went down to the tent to find Jimmie and Teddy still absent.

"There are two things we'll have to set aside time for," Ned
declared, as he took a seat on the ground before the blaze, with a
great plate of food in his lap. "We'll have to arrange for keeping
Uncle Ike, the mule, out of mischief, and for keeping track of Jimmie
and Teddy. Those boys will get lost in the mountains yet, and go
hungry for a few days. That would be punishment enough for Jimmie--
hunger!"

The boys sat by the campfire a long time, heaping dry wood on the
blaze until they were obliged to widen the circle about it. There was
only the light of the stars, looking down from a cloud-flecked sky,
but there would be a moon shortly after ten o'clock.