that night was between two logs that the bark-peelers had stripped
ten or more years before. As they had left the bark there, and as
hemlock bark makes excellent fuel, I had more reasons than one to
be grateful to them.

In the morning I felt much refreshed, and as if the night had tided
me over the bar that threatened to stay my progress. If I can steer
clear of skimmed milk, I said, I shall now finish the voyage of
fifty miles to Hancock with increasing pleasure.

When one breaks camp in the morning, he turns back again and again
to see what he has left. Surely, he feels, he has forgotten
something; what is it? But it is only his own sad thoughts and
musings he has left, the fragment of his life he has lived there.
Where he hung his coat on the tree, where he slept on the boughs,
where he made his coffee or broiled his trout over the coals, where
he drank again and again at the little brown pool in the spring
run, where he looked long and long up into the whispering branches
overhead, he has left what he cannot bring away with him,--the
flame and the ashes of himself.

Of certain game-birds it is thought that at times they have the
power of withholding their scent; no hint or particle of themselves
goes out upon the air. I think there are persons whose spiritual
pores are always sealed up, and I presume they have the best time
of it. Their hearts never radiate into the void; they do not yearn
and sympathize without return; they do not leave themselves by the
wayside as the sheep leaves her wool upon the brambles and thorns.

This branch of the Delaware, so far as I could learn, had never