66 AROUND AN OLD HOMESTEAD. 



" 'Very little [he replied], but I should say he must be a 

 wondrous strong person, if he made all those big bright things 

 up above there, to say nothing of the ground on which we stand, 

 which bears beings like these oaks, each of which is fifty times 

 as strong as myself, and will last fifty times as long.' " 



Kinglake also, in his "Eothen," relates a romantic ex- 

 perience of his making a bivouac near the Jordan. 



Thoreau enjoyed a camp-fire as few ever did. 1 

 recollect especially his accounts of camp-fires in "The 

 Maine Woods," and this characteristic passage in par- 

 ticular : 



"It was interesting, when awakened at midnight, to watch 

 the grotesque and fiend-like forms and motions of some one 

 of the party, who, not being able to sleep, had got up silently 

 to arouse the fire, and add fresh fuel, for a change; now 

 stealthily lugging a dead tree from out the dark, and heaving 

 it on, now stirring up the embers with his fork, or tiptoeing 

 about to observe the stars, watched, perchance, by half the 

 prostrate party in breathless silence ; £0 much the more intense 

 because they were awake, while each supposed his neighbor 

 sound asleep." 



Mr. Richard Watson Gilder has sung of the camp- 

 fire, and its light upon the trees in the forest, In "The 

 Voice of the Pine :" 



" 'T is night upon the lake. Our bed of boughs 

 Is built where, high above, the pine tree soughs. 

 'T is still — and yet what woody noise^ loom 

 Against the background of the silent gloom! 



"Long had we lain beside our pine-wood fire. 

 From things of sport our talk had risen higher. 

 How frank and intimate the words of men 

 When tented lonely in some forest glen ! 



