47° 



RECREATION 



ful driving, goes through them. Near- 

 ly always the other motorist in the con- 

 versation has been over a worse road 

 and made quicker time! If you have 

 a picture of the road, however, and he 

 has none, the weight of evidence will 

 rest with you, and you will have the 

 fleeting satisfaction of being listened to 

 with respect as one who is evidently 

 telling the truth. 



If you have a bad accident, and can 

 escape destruction long enough to get 

 a picture of it, you will have something 

 to talk about. I am thankful to say I 

 can not illustrate this feature, never 

 having been in an accident worth call- 

 ing by that name. Nor do I carry a 

 camera on auto trips with the precon- 

 ceived idea of using it in an accident ; 

 still, it is a comfort to know that if I 

 must meet with misfortune and escape 

 uninjured, and the camera isn't broken, 

 I may get that accident picture. 



Accidents to the machine, — or inci- 

 dents, as so many owners call them, — 

 make interesting pictures, as witness 



the accompanying ''What in thunder is 

 the matter with it?" — a picture I se- 

 cured while my two companions were 

 trying to locate a most unaccountable 

 noise. Further investigation revealed 

 a piece of wire, caught up from the 

 road in some mysterious way in the 

 clutch, which was making quite un- 

 earthly tappings and rappings. The 

 picture hardly needs a title, does it? 



Altogether, the camera and the auto 

 mix very well, provided the first is 

 made subordinate to the second, and if 

 all the auto pictures you secure are 

 kept separate from the rest of your 

 collection, and those belonging to any 

 one run, dated and surrounded with a 

 little memoranda of that particular 

 day's sport, you will be surprised at the 

 interest the collection as a whole has, 

 not only for you, but for your friends, 

 whose auto' trips, perhaps, are limited 

 to invitations only. Try it once, and 

 see if you do not enjoy more than you 

 thought possible an auto trip through 

 an auto scrap-book of you own. 



HOW TO REMOVE BARK FROM THE SPRUCE 



By HANK HENNINGS 



A spruce canoe is a very poor craft. 

 In fact, it is only a makeshift, but 

 one that is often used because large 

 spruce are very much more abundant 

 than large birch. A good woodsman 

 can make a rough-and-ready spruce 

 canoe in a few hours. He, usually, 

 makes a rough frame of some round 

 sapling, and fastens the spruce bark to 

 it by binding it on with thread made 

 from the long, tough roots of the spruce. 

 The ends are stitched with the same ma- 

 terial, and should nothing else be on 

 hand to pitch the seams with, some gum 

 collected from other spruce trees, and 

 mixed with a little bacon fat, may serve 

 the purpose. 



The usual method of taking off the 

 bark from either a birch or a spruce, is 

 to chop down some smaller trees so that 

 they fall at right angles to the direction 



the tree must take when it comes down. 

 This is done in order to keep the trunk 

 off the ground, thus enabling it to be 

 peeled more easily, as well as to prevent 

 the bark from being damaged by con- 

 tact with rocks. But it frequently hap- 

 pens that there are no small trees grow- 

 ing in such position that they may be 

 used for this purpose, and, perhaps, the 

 neatest way of taking off a fine sheet of 

 bark is to make a rough-and-ready lad- 

 der, stripping the bark off by means of 

 hard wooden wedges. One of the cuts 

 must be the full length of the sheet 

 from top to bottom ; the others are made 

 around the upper and lower edges of it, 

 all around the tree. A careful Indian 

 canoe-maker never removes a first- 

 class bark excepting in this manner, 

 and when removed, the bark is slight- 

 ly warmed, and rolled up in a tight roll. 



