42 The Mountaineer 
MELODIOUS DAYS 
HUGH ELMER BROWN 
x0 TIS hard to shun the “vice of the superlative” in speaking of 
my trip with the Mountaineers. I had a vacation fit for a 
king. It was a golden parenthesis of leisure from motor- 
eH cycles, circulating libraries, bill-collectors, and daily news- 
papers. The sights and sounds of “‘snivelization” became a hazy remi- 
niscence. I laughed in the face of the clock and jested with schedule. 
I crawled out of the rushing current of life’s employment and sat on 
the bank of complete rest and sunned my very soul. 
MacDougall in his “Pleasant fields of France” tells of game pre- 
serves Where it is well-nigh impossible for the hounds to follow the 
game. The fragrance of countless wild flowers is so strong that the 
scent will not lie. My vacation in the Olympic preserve gave deliver- 
ance from the dogs; the fierce pack of curs that yelp and worry were 
compelled to stand outside. I escaped completely from the over com- 
plicated life of the city where folks breathe second-hand oxygen and 
discuss books they have not read. My pilgrimage was not shackled 
by the compulsory castles, the mandatory museums, the required 
ruins, which enslave the traveler abroad. I was free to feed at large 
in the big out-of-door solitudes; to enjoy the pure hospitalities of 
life ; to ponder the solemn wonder and beauty of existence; to “loaf and 
invite the soul.” 
He who is jaded in mind is easy prey to pessimism and cynicism, 
but to be thrown into the fenceless fields along with a hundred sifted 
spirits, all in festive and friendly mood, is to have one’s optimism 
cheerfully and powerfully revived. Travel of any sort brings out 
what there is in a man, especially ocean travel. If you desire to know 
a man, then camp out with him for a week. If there are unsuspected 
elements in his make-up, they are sure to come into the open. No man 
can long be a hypocrite in his pleasures. And to find a group of a hun- 
dred drawn from the four points of the compass, held in the enforced 
socialism of trail and camp, besieged by the soft vicissitudes of each 
other’s society and the oceasional trials of the trip, and yet to find on 
closest scrutiny no evidences of ugliness, gloominess, or growl—this 
was fresh proof of the joyous soundness of normal human nature. 
Indeed the Mountaineers are the most interesting, the finest brand of 
sinners, I have met for a long while. They seem mixed together in a 
rugged conspiracy to make things go happily. | 
