THE OPEN WOOD FIRE. 65 



has ever bivouacked as a soldier but will gladly jour- 

 ney back again on the march to watch once more on 

 the battlefields of memory. 



The camp-fires of literature are many. They began 

 with Abel and the sacrifice. And in the Bible story, 

 too, are other wood fires: Sarah and her cakes; Abra- 

 ham and Isaac; the roasting of the Passover; Jehoiakim 

 the king before the hearth. Peter it was who warmed 

 himself in indolence before a fire while his Lord was 

 buffeted; but it was the same impulsive Peter who was 

 the first to reach the land when the Master called the 

 fishermen to the shore of Galilee, and "they saw a fire 

 of coals there, and fish laid thereon, and bread" — and 

 Henry van Dyke says that he would rather have been 

 at that camp-fire than at any other in history. 



Homer and Virgil make frequent mention of the 

 camp-fire, and the roasting thereon of venison and the 

 flesh of bulls and goats, pierced through with spits. 

 Theocritus also loved it, as well as the domestic hearth. 



George Borrow, in his peculiarly wild and adven- 

 turous gypsy tales, has much to say of the open fire be- 

 side his tent; confessing, in "Lavengro," in a most 

 singular and pathetic love story, that it was in Mum- 

 per's Dingle, beside the camp-fire of their gypsy taber- 

 nacle, that he wooed, and lost, the fine-natured, true- 

 hearted Isopel Berners. In few passages, also, of Bor- 

 row's books is his real character revealed so delight- 

 fully as in these apparently chance remarks with the 

 Welsh preacher's wife in their encampment by the oaks 

 under the stars: 



"'Excuse me, young man [she asked], but do you know 

 anything of God?' 



