6 PEPACTON 



inches deep, so as to admit your body from your 

 hips to your shoulders; you thus get an equal bear- 

 ing the whole length of you. I am told the West- 

 ern hunters and guides do this. On the same prin- 

 ciple, the sand makes a good bed, and the snow. 

 You make a mould in which you fit nicely. My 

 berth that night was between two logs that the 

 barkpeelers 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 mus- 

 ings 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 



