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from mine! And just to prove it, I asked him to loan me the 
pictures he made and here they are!” 
Mr. Spence produced a bundle of amateur snap shots. Mrs. 
Spence took them curiously, Dorry and Larry looking over her 
shoulder. There was one showing the party en route — another 
showing the camp at night with a tent fly stretched from auto¬ 
mobile side to ground for shelter, and the people sitting about 
an open fire-—a third delineating an early morning swim in a 
river which the party was shown crossing on a flat boat ferry in 
the next picture, and so on. 
“Seeing is believing — you'd better admit right out that it can 
be done, because we are going to do it!” announced Mr. Spence 
triumphantly at the growing interest on Mrs. Spence’s face. 
“Hurrah for Dad!” came the united shout of both children. 
“Good Fairy to the front. From farm wagon to guide in the 
pathless forest! Dad, I want a rifle!” from Larry. “And a com¬ 
plete fishing outfit,” put 
in Dorry. “And I think 
I ought to have a reg¬ 
ular corduroy camping 
out suit with sombrero 
and all!” hazarded Mrs. 
Spence, looking at her 
husband and smiling. 
So it was arranged, 
and a few weeks later 
they actually did start 
on a camping trip, with 
the same old Good 
Fairy which had been 
everything else in their 
lives at “The Gardens” 
now acting as Pullman 
car and railroad com¬ 
bined. 
To be sure, camping 
out was ' somewhat dif¬ 
ferent from Pullman 
cars. 
“But it’s nice except 
when it rains!” agreed 
Mrs. Spence. 
The relief from even the mild constraint of a country home 
was a welcome change to all. Dorry and Mrs. Spence did the 
cooking — Larry and Mr. Spence washed the dishes. Sleeping 
bags on rubber blankets did for beds, and the whole camp 
equipment was easily packed on running boards and on the ton¬ 
neau floor; the bedding roll — a huge affair — was successfully 
strapped on behind. 
There was no hurry, so they tried for no records. It- was 
their practice to stop about four in the afternoon, whenever an 
attractive field near the road gave promise of a suitable camping 
place. Locations near either river or spring were not hard to 
find, once north of the Massachusetts line, and making camp soon 
became an exact science. Larry gathered firewood while his 
father put up the fly tent. The automobile did duty as one tent 
pole, and by having the fly long enough to form a curtain against 
the automobile, they were protected from a too strong draft 
underneath. The fly was made of oiled balloon silk, waterproof, 
twelve feet long and fourteen feet wide, which gave it a spread 
of eight feet. The outward edge was either tied to trees or sup¬ 
ported on poles cut for the purpose with the light camp ax which 
they carried. The balloon tent was very light and folded to go 
under the back cushion. 
“It’s funny to sit on your house all day and go to sleep under 
it at night!” Dorry murmured, when she saw the arrangement. 
Nesting tins of aluminum did duty both for cooking purposes 
and carry food for lunch. A set of five takes up but little room 
and is very light. A square fry pan with detachable handle, and 
a coffee pot with a nest of five cups inside it, very easily took care 
of the storage of those unhandy articles. 
“No fine hampers with knives and forks and napkins and room¬ 
taking ice compartments for us!” Mr. Spence had ruled, made 
wise in his day and generation by many conversations with 
Albright, who had “been through the mill.” “The thing to do is 
to have as little as possible to look after and have that little pack- 
able in the least possible space !” 
Food, of course, was secured through the country. Farmers 
were glad to sell them eggs and fresh fruit, and they replenished 
butter, coffee, sugar, flour and such things easily enough at the 
various towns through which they passed. 
“No use stocking up with pounds and pounds of everything— 
we’ve little room and 
plenty of time—we’ll 
get the things as we go 
along,” commanded the 
captain-in-chief, as the 
children called their 
father, and so it was 
managed. 
Once actually up in 
the woods, they planned 
to camp out only as 
long as the roads con¬ 
tinued good—but when 
they drew near the 
hunting ground it was 
arranged that Dorry 
and her mother were to 
go to a summer camp 
and stay there, while 
Larry and his father 
took a guide and went 
into the woods for their 
hunting. 
It is impossible in a 
condensed story of this 
kind to give the many 
adventures which happened to this pair of boys—for Mr. Spence 
found and gladly proclaimed that since he had become a farmer 
he became younger rather than older every year. The purpose of 
these various incidents is not to tell a connected and dramatic 
narrative, but to show, in as lifelike a manner as their sketchy 
torm will allow, the main facts about the automobile as an actual 
aid to actual living, not considered merely in the light of a luxu¬ 
rious toy, the main purpose of which is to haul one about in the 
evening or use as an aid to a shopping or theater-going expedi¬ 
tion. That the Spences should cap the climax of the many uses 
they had found for Good Fairy by finding it useful as a hunting 
companion contains nothing strange. Others have found it per¬ 
fectly feasible to camp out in an automobile as well as in a canoe 
or a sailboat. 
“And we had plenty to eat and plenty to wear and plenty to 
enjoy every minute of the time, didn’t we, Dad?” Larry defended 
their odd vacation to a schoolmate. “I tell you, I’ve seen a lot of 
people buy and use cars” (Larry spoke as if of great age and 
long experience, to his father's great though secret amusement), 
“but I’ve never seen any one who knew how much there was in 
a motor car, until we learned!” 
“Did you ever count it up, and set down exactly what the car 
has done?” 
(Continued on page 392) 
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