First of all, accord. If there are dubious minds among you, send them to a seaside hotel. Take only the valiant spirits. Strength of body is not essential. Strength of mind is. And, having thus sifted the family group for cinders, begin with lists. Lists are to a camping trip what catalogues are to the amateur gardener the essence of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.

And, as accord is not always achieved in the face of discomfort, in making the lists two things are essential-to eat well and to lie warm and dry. Traveling, as I always do, with a train of pack animals, my lists are full to the point of extravagance. As our family camping trips are always in the wilderness, there is no possibility of living off the country. And, indeed, even in good game regions it is wise not to depend on the guns for

meat.

I have just returned from a camping trip in Mexico. Unluckily, owing to the war, this year it could not be a family party, but, as usual, I had a lengthy pack outfit of mules.

When I gave the list to that member of the party who was in charge of supplies-it is wise to have a sort of mess officer on such excursions-he protested over the amount of ham, bacon, and tinned meats I was ordering.

"We'll get plenty of game," he said. "There is deer everywhere.'

"Nevertheless," I replied, with firmness, "we are going to take along enough to carry us through. I have been in deer country before."

And it is a lamentable fact that, with deer tracks everywhere, with our hearts fixed on venison, and with some twelve rifles and shotguns in the party, we tasted no venison on that trip, and were reduced to canned salmon before we touched the fringes of civilization.

Eggs I always carry. This last time they were in a crate marked "fragile," and they proved so, indeed. But there was enough salvage for many comfortable breakfasts. I take jam

and jellies, oranges and lemons, cocoa (which is delicious made with canned milk), and enough bread, not crackers, for the first three or four days. I am convinced that more camping trips have gone down to failure because of the much-vaunted flapjack than for any other reason.

Now the way of a man with a camp is strange, and I speak from much experience. His methods are his own, and he refuses to change them; for men are much like cats, as fixed in their habits, and as prone when led away from them to wander back. The more professional the camper, the more fixed is his method. And this is his method.

(Be it understood that I do not here refer to the head of the family. He acquired his camping habits with a woman, and knows her feminine partiality to dish-towels.)

First of all, he finds a camp site. He appears to base this selection entirely to the proximity of fishing and with a complete scorn of mosquitoes and of a level place to spread the beds. Having thus located himself, he builds a fire.

At this he is excellent. One may judge the experience of a camper by the size of his cooking fire. The novice goes down to the creek side and emerges from the thicket dragging a young tree. The real camper puts four stones, or six, in a double row a foot apart, takes six dried leaves, a dozen twigs slivered with his penknife, a box of matches, and-has a fire.

In the meantime the outfit has been unpacked and spread out over the ground. There is a confusion of boxes and sacks, kettles and pans. Your old camper runs his eye over these, and, finding the coffee-pot, at once proceeds to make the coffee. He has no rule about coffee. Roughly speaking, he divides the amount of coffee brought by the number of meals it has to last, dilutes it with two cups of water for each person, and lets it go at that. But there is a type of man who will empty an entire can of the best Mocha into the pot, and the end of that man is tea.

Having put the coffee on the fire, he then proceeds to look for potatoes to peel. The potatoes are, however, in a box, and the

hatchet cannot be located. When the box is opened at last with a can-opener and a case-knife, the potato-parer is missing. Mad search for the paring-knife. The coffee boils over, and is filled up with water again.

Exactly an hour and forty minutes after the coffee is ready the meal is prepared.

But it is at the serving of the meal that men show how facile is their reversion to savagery.

I like to sit down to my meals. I am perfectly willing to sit on a box or a flat stone or on the ground-except in Mexico, where the safest-appearing grass conceals lurking barbs. But I want a real meal. Therefore when the cook, or that male of the party who has assumed the cooking-it is odd that a man who cannot make a piece of toast for a wife with a headache, after the servants have gone to bed, will cheerfully assume the duties of cook in the open-when this courageous male has called the party to a meal, I do not care to stand in a cloud of smoke, trying to hold a knife and fork, a tin plate, a mug of coffee, a paper napkin, and a sweet smile.

It is here that the presence of a woman may make itself felt for good. A little firmness, which may include hiding the coffee-pot until the psychological moment, a tarpaulin spread on the ground (even if the dog does think it is meant as a bed for him), and the actual placing on that tarpaulin of salt and pepper, bread, butter, and jam, will do much to make camp meals less of a stoking process-—and will make, too, for that deliberation of eating which is a part of what should be the leisure of life in the open.

Where plenty of equipment can be taken, I like a sheet-iron camp stove. Its chimney localizes the smoke, for one thing. But it does more than that; it keeps the kettles clean. The professional camper in the West, the man who lives in the open, is very calm about kettles. And he achieves a tea towel, rather often, by the simple means of waiting until the onion sack is empty, and then using that. His dish-washing is primitive. It consists, when he is on the move, of washing his dishes only when they are needed, and he does this in a creek, with a handful of sand. I am not decrying his method, but it is against my housewifely instinct to pack soiled dishes.

Where there is a permanent camp, and the feminine members of the party have rashly assumed the cooking, a sheet-iron stove is indispensable, since it obviates stooping to a certain degree. It is easily portable and its methods are simple. Being bottomless, it is simply set over the cooking fire.

A camp stove and a reflector oven. How many battles I have fought over the reflector oven! And how seldom I have won! Your old camper has one love, and only one-a Dutch oven. And it has its uses. If one cares for duck for breakfast, there is nothing more delicious than Dutch-oven duck. Cleaned and seasoned, the ducks are placed in the oven, as many as it will hold or as many as the hunters have brought in. No water is used.

While the ducks have been preparing, or being prepared, if your list has included a spade, the willing member of the party there is always a willing member-is digging a hole with it. If you have not brought a spade, the ground is being hollowed out with a hatchet, the bread-knife, the cake-turner, and a few remarks. Having the hole slightly larger than the oven, wait until the cook's back is turned and then steal some of the cooking fire and drop it into the hole. When the ground is hot, place the Dutch oven in the excavation, put on its iron lid, cover the lid with red-hot embers, and then shovel back the earth with the cake-turner.

In the morning there is the duck or chicken or quail or venison, cooked to an amazing tenderness. Not a particle of the flavor has escaped.

But the Dutch oven for bread is another matter. Now camp bread is of two sorts, biscuits and flapjacks. If there is anything more difficult than to toss a large and flabby flapjack, it is to digest it. Biscuits, therefore, are the safest form. And for biscuits I will take issue with the oldest camper on the Dutch oven. To remove them at that exact golden-brown moment which is essential is to watch them carefully. And to watch them carefully is, at each peep, to move a hollow iron lid filled with embers.

The reflector oven, instead of employing the clandestine

methods of the Dutch oven, is open and aboveboard. It presents its fearless bright and shining tin interior to the world and the camp fire. It nestles beside the blaze like a kitten on the hearth. Under its influence little round pads of dough swell like spring buds before one's hungry eyes. The first golden tinge is the proper signal for putting the coffee on the fire. And when that golden shade deepens here and there to the warmer tints of oak leaves in autumn, bring the butter in its crock from where it has been cooling in the creek and sit you down to your bacon and biscuits and coffee and to such bright reflection as that of the little tin oven.

Tents are nuisances except for the permanent camp. Even then they are better reserved as dressing tents, although in mosquito regions a tent with a netting fly is a comfort. They are cumbersome to carry, troublesome to put up, and as open to the air as a Brussels carpet. The sickliest child is better for sleeping out on the ground, and even a summer rain does not spell catastrophe. Excellent bed-rolls are sold now, of mattress, blankets, and pillows, all inclosed in a waterproof cover. For rain there is a flap to draw over the head.

There is a new and strange thrill in lying out under the sky. One meets the stars again. Also one learns things about them. Not until I had slept out in this manner did I learn that the dipper upsets during the night. Also, I have learned the hypoc risy of the heavens, in that rain can fall out of a clear sky. It is almost insulting to lie admiring the star-lit zenith and to receive directly in the right eye a large and bursting drop of rain.

For rainy days, of course, there must be some shelter. The dressing tent will answer, but it is rather amusing to build one's own shelter. This should be undertaken, however, before the weather breaks. I have known of some excellent dispositions and entirely amicable family relations being disturbed by the necessity of building a hut during a tornado. And in Mexico, recently, I was compelled to lie for hours in my bed-roll under a "tarp tarp" while in a hundred-mile gale our men cut palm leaves for such a purpose. And all the while the pool in which I lay rose about my hair mattress as inevitably as an incoming tide.

Old clothing, heavy shoes, and plenty of warm things, with a slicker for each member of the party-these are the essentials. Nights are cold in the open, even in the semi-tropical countries. Khaki seems the best all-around wear, supplemented with sweaters. With warm clothing, plenty of food and blankets, and a determination to preserve the family entente cordiale through every emergency, the camping trip for the family should be an unqualified success. But there is one element not yet provided for.

The novelty of the outdoors life wears off after a bit. Primitive housekeeping does not fill all the daylight hours. So there should be amusement.

Fishing is attractive only to the elect. It requires the soul of a philosopher, the leisure of a poet, and the hope of a Second Adventist. The lure of quiet pools is for those who have found in life itself the call to peace.

Yet the youngsters must be amused. Games are for the house. At their best they are for the shelter of home, with the world shut out. They need a fireside. For the boys, and often for the girls, the one game which never palls, which is endlessly interesting, is shooting. Every boy should know how to use a gun, and how not to misuse it, to load it, fire it, and--but here lies the way of misery!-to clean it after he has used it. My own boys were given small rifles almost as early as they could carry them. I myself learned to shoot when I was a very young mother, and my rifle range was a long old-fashioned cellar with a furnace pipe just above the target.

By shooting I do not necessarily mean hunting. The wanton desire to kill for the sake of killing is easily cured by a simple rule that only killing for food is permissible, and that everything killed must be eaten. But I must confess that a rigid adherence to that rule would have provided some strange meals for us at times.

Now that we have learned that our only safety is to make every man and boy a potential soldier, when universal military training must come if our Republic is to survive, I should like to see our boys being taught to shoot just as we have always

taught them to swim, to meet emergency. The boy trained to firearms is never reckless. It is the boy who knows neither their use nor their danger who commits his careless crimes of youth and ignorance.

So the family camping trip may have many benefits. It brings together those whom the involved days and useless trappings of life have kept apart. It brings health and simplicity, and a

closer contact with the earth and the lovely things of the earth. It gives perspective, too, for in the open the unimportant drops away and is forgotten. And by showing us our country, not as a thing of houses and streets, of newspapers and gossip and a million trivialities, but as a great mother earth, feeding and caring for her child Nation, it renews our faith in it and ourselves.

The order surprised me and caused me to look across the table; I had never known him to drink before

dinner time.

We were lunching at a downtown club-Philemon L. Powers and I. The room was filled with two hundred or more wellgroomed, keen-faced New York business men. As they passed our table coming in or going out, nearly every one nodded or threw a friendly word to my host. He was equally well known to the bankers, the brokers, the railway magnates, the coal barons, the shipping fraternity, and the nondescript individuals who coalesced into a class about five o'clock at the Union League, and into another class later in the evening at one of the university clubs.

"A dry Martini, first."

The waiter, scarcely less insinuatingly, but slightly more impertinently, than his type at the hotel I frequented, said: "Yes, sir, Mr. Powers; a dry Martini, sir."

But there was just the faintest tinge of surprise in his tone, or I thought there was.

"The coal situation hasn't improved at all, and probably never will until they put the whole matter back where it belongs -in Secretary Lane's hands. We all expected transportation to break down; the Government has really operated the roads through the Inter-State Commerce Commission by means of rates for a generation, and now confesses its previous incompetency by operating them by ukase. You can't starve the land without starving the crop, and you can't starve the crop without starving the farmer; so we let the railways go lean for thirty years, and now we are surprised that every mill and factory in the country is hungry for raw material."

His voice was level and firm, but it rasped. And yet Powers was reputed to be the most inveterate optimist below City Hall. "England and France sent us commissioners, men who really knew the game, and they poured out experience which had the hallmark of scars upon it, but we learned nothing. Here is what I hear about ship-building. And this is what they tell me concerning the aircraft programme. . . . I got these facts about high explosives direct from.

Bitterness grew more marked as he proceeded; it made his lip curl and put hardness into his eyes; his fingers crumbled the rye bread and his chops were untouched. For a half-hour Powers talked of the things he knew, and with each sentence he disclosed a man I had never seen before.

"And I have two boys over there with Pershing-all I have left in the world—you know them. My God, if only Washing ton-"

A swift gesture as he threw his napkin aside upset an untouched cup of coffee.

Outside, on Broadway, a few dispirited rays of sunshine struggled down to the floor of the canyon. As we moved toward the Battery it seemed to me that the men we met lacked snap and verve; they walked as if the pride of life had been smitten, they acted as though they had been frustrated in a great endeavor. Powers noticed it too, and spoke apologetically.

"New York cannot shorten its stride to the Washington gait. Doing big things in a little way and urgent things as if

we could lounge through eternity makes us nervous. I ought to have gone to Florida for February and March, as in other years; but with two boys under Pershing I thought I might be needed here. Damn it, what does it matter how much I know or what I can do if I'm labeled a friend of Roosevelt ? Why—”

We were in the deepest part of the canyon, but just then the sunshine reached down and touched me with something like a caress. The granite walls seemed to fade away, and I saw a bit of land I love well, where the fields run up to the forest, and the frogs strum in the twilight, and the loons cry on the lake at night. Powers," I said, "you need a change, a complete change. We must go fishing."

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I laid my hand on his arm and we let the crowd swirl past. And there, while a stream of nervous, irritable, depressed, and humiliated men went by, I told him of Louis Hall, who knew all the waters. of the lower Adirondacks, and all the trout in all the waters, and all the flies that the trout like, and all the birds that eat the flies, and all the trees and shrubs in which the birds live, and all the stars that shine above the trees, and, perhaps, all the realities that lie beyond the stars.

As I left him I found myself saying, "When he gets on a trout stream he will not need a Martini, and when he has had a week in the woods the Government will not be content to do without him."

II

Powers and Louis eyed each other with distrust, or disdain, or envy, I could not tell which. It was my fault undoubtedly. I had spoken too enthusiastically to the New Yorker about the guide and I had written too eulogistically about the financier. They stood side by side at the head of the Long Pool, the one in a faultless sport suit, holding a new and expensive rod, and · the other shaggy and dirty, straightening out a leader. 'Quank, quank, quank, quank!”

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"What's that?" asked Powers.

"Bird; nuthatch," Louis said, bluntly, and continued to dip and pull the leader taut.

It was not like Louis, who usually gave information gladly and graciously. His knowledge had been absorbed so unconsciously that he allowed it to pour out as though he were thinking aloud. He seemed to have a way of hearing things that made no sound, of seeing things that did not appear, and of feeling things that he could not touch. He could tell you a hundred intimate items about the living things, furred or feathered, which the naturalists do not know; he seemed instinctively to feel the romance, to understand the psychology, to interpret the reasoning, of the tiniest creature. And generally he talked about such matters with infinitely more ease and confidence than a banker does of money or a merchant of fabrics. "About the time the kinglets came through," he would say, “I saw there was going to be an early summer and lots of berries, so I wrote to Mr. Gray that we'd be sure to get a couple of bear about the end of June."

The sky was overcast and the Long Pool dark and still. Being rigged first, I cast for luck and took my fish without trouble all the way to the net through deep, open water. “What did you use?" Louis called to me.

There was no doubt now in my mind-Powers and Louis were mutually antagnostic. Horrible! It was the one thing I had not thought of, the one contingency I had not provided for, the one situation I could not have imagined. Neither man was ill-natured, and neither man knew enough of the other to have grounds for dislike. The day was unusually quiet, the woods were a mist of tender green, the stream was alternately a rich, sheeny brown and a rush of shining silver; there was the drone of insects in the air, often relieved by the call of a bird in nestbuilding time; and there was no hurry, there were no appointments, no duties-none of the trivial impertinences of civilization. Of course it would have been fatal if I had taken Powers away from Louis, so I directed them down-stream together. I was glad to be alone, for that first short half-day of fishing the Long Pool was all I needed. The place was as serene as the soul of a babe, just the environment to heal the sores that had been kept festering by the news of the winter. And five trout in the first hour! One had put up a rare fight; I hooked him on a short left-hand cast, close to an undercut bank; he rushed and sulked in turn; he tore up-stream almost to my feet until my arms ached with reeling over my head; twice he broke water unexpectedly; once he had the line all but snarled in some loose brush; even to the end he made short rushes and snubbed or shook his head viciously. When it was over and the last thrill had subsided into the depths of memory, I sat down with my back against a fallen tree and drank contentedly of the stillness-the musical stillness of a thousand perfect harmonies. How far away Ypres, Cambrai, Toul, Verdun seemed! How remote the Yser, the Somme, the Jordan, and the Tigris! Why should the heavies roar, and the machine guns rat-tat, and the rifles crackle, spreading pain and death and horror among mankind, when the heart might have all it wanted of peace and joy in a place as simple as this? Madness must have infected half the race!

A half-mile down the stream I found Powers and Louis sitting one on either side of a woods road. They did not see or hear me.

"I suppose you know all there is to know about this part of the world," Powers remarked to the guide, in a colorless and humanless voice.

"No, I don't; no one does," Louis said, aggressively. "There's always a chance for anybody to learn more if he doesn't think he knows it all himself."

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Well, what more could you learn about the woods?" "Millions of things," Louis said; "millions of things. Last year I guided for a man who showed me more about the plants and flowers than I could have found out alone in a thousand years. But you've got to know you don't know afore you can begin to get any knowledge. He showed me which was yellow adder's-tongues, bloodroots, Dutchman's-breeches, hepaticas, trilliums, and lots of other flowers that don't grow with their names labeled on them. There ain't any money in learning such things, though, so I guess that's why they ain't reckoned of much-"

Louis was just finishing the last sentence with deliberate emphasis when he saw me and stopped abruptly.

III

Our second day of sport was not a success. Shadow Lake, when conditions are just right, is the finest fly surface in the lower Adirondacks. But conditions could not have been worse, and if Louis had been normal he would never have sanctioned the expedition. Unfortunately, the evening before Powers had said something about fishing from a boat; Louis evidently saw the chance of giving him some perverse satisfaction.

During the night two or three thunder-storms broke, and torrents of mud had been carried down the hillsides into the lake. The wind blew a gale all day; the water was rough as well as dark; the boat could not be held in one place or even in a given direction; one man had to bale all the time.

The only satisfaction was the sky. Its blue was of the rarest -deep, remote, rich. The cloud masses were sometimes fantastic and sometimes sublime in their unarranged order; there were continents and islands of pure white sailing overhead; they moved occasionally according to mental prediction, but more often with amazing irregularity; just when it seemed as if several banks would merge into a vast woolly mountain they were smoothed out sheer across the vault like an alabaster causeway, only to melt away, one knew not how. From the alternations of sunlight and moving shadow one saw every imaginable shade of green on the wooded hillsides. Now and then a mountain peak caught a radiance which turned its point to gold above the contrasting flanks of olive deepening to brown. The wavelets on the lake looked like gleaming teeth as they broke out from a black reflection. It was all wild and restless and passionate, like a fugue upon an organ played with such a furious tempo that the motif cannot be discerned.

Casting a heavy gang of flies in a comparatively sheltered bay, I raised two or three small trout, but the work was irritating and not worth the effort. There was nothing left but to tramp back to the Inn. The four-mile trail across the hills and through the woods had seemed easy in the morning, when hope was strong and the air fresh; but in the afternoon, following several hours of stiff, invigorating wind, the lungs felt pinched, the feet heavy, and the music had died out of the heart. And the woods seemed noisy; a hundred creatures chattered and piped and screeched; it sounded like a conspiracy of impertinences after the solemn dignity of the rushing wind.

In the evening, before the fire, Louis took the initiative in talk. He had evidently intended to take it and keep it. There was something calculated in the manner of choosing and treating his themes an air of challenge, a note of defiance, a tone satiric and sardonic. He was a different Louis from the one I had known during a dozen seasons in the woods and on the streams. Several of his pronouncements were so positive and provocative that I have no difficulty in recalling them:

"Millionaires don't get any more of the real things than plain men. There ain't a bird in the world sings any sweeter because there's a guy with a check-book a-hangin' round. Trout don't ever ask the price of a rod afore they strike. There's just so much sunshine a-comin' down and everybody gets it all.

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This idea of making the world safe for democracy is all right if it don't fool you. Nobody wants democracy. Everybody wants autocracy or Socialism; but in these times o' censureships folks is afraid to go the whole hog in any direction. Democracy is only a clearing in the woods where the lumbermen live while they're getting out the timber. When we've paid all the costs of this war, we won't have our money's worth, an' the ones that paid the most for democracy will want something better. When anybody talks democracy to me, I don't know if he means Wall Street and Vanderbilt or Jake Price an' his seven motherless children up there by the North Fork, six miles o' trail away from a school-house.

"There's a whole lot of buncombe about making sacrifices for democracy. Old Gudwich, that has the swell camp on Moseley Lake, is makin' money hand over fist-millions of it; and young Gudwich, that has a bigger camp on the other side of Moseley, is just over fightin' age, and he's makin' heaps o' money too, and spending it like fury, puttin' wire all round his place, buildin' hard roads, startin' a fish hatchery, and hirin' gamekeepers that wear trousers down to their knees an' leather leggins. Then poor old Mary Peet had her two boys, Dick and Bill, took for the Army; Dick was drafted an' Bill enlisted in the city without knowing Dick was goin'; so now poor old Mary ain't got a soul to run the place an' the plow has still got the winter rust on it. When the boys get back from the war, that sort o' democracy 'll be reckoned a kind of blood relation o' autocracy, and they'll push on to Socialism. When you get marchin' with real ideas, there ain't no stopping at half-way houses.

"What do I mean by Socialism? Not just taking money.

o'

away from one man and giving it to another. No, sir; I mean giving everybody the same chance to enjoy things an' do things. Socialism would even make eyes grow in the souls of rich New York men. If they could hear the sap a-rushing up the maples in March, an' feel the ferns awaking in April, an' see the breath o' spring a-greening all the tops of the woods, an' understand from the song o' the birds how the new nest was getting along, an' know what the river is a-saying in the moonlight; if they could lay open a cord o' stove wood in a forenoon, an' drive lumber with the first freshet, an' just eat an' sleep for a spell with the men a-gettin' out the big stuff away back-if the poor New York merr could have all o' that instead o' livin' all day in them coffins they call offices, they might know somethin' better than they get out o' the newspapers. Socialism only says that money can't kill any more men.

"I'm a. Socialist by my own way o' thinkin', not one o' the dynamite kind. This is how I figure it: Autocracy says, All yours is mine; democracy says, All mine is my own; Socialism says, All mine is yours. An' that's mighty nigh religion, too, as the 'postle Paul lined it out."

Louis was obviously raining his blows upon Powers, but the financier hardly noticed the attack; he smoked his cigarettes with languid indifference, and after a while yawned, wished us good-night, and turned in. Louis looked at me as if to ask my opinion, knocked the ashes from his pipe, kicked a log protruding from the fire, and turned to leave. "Didn't get near enough to gaff him," I thought I heard him say as he opened the door. IV

Louis was to meet us at noon with the lunch. Everything was propitious for sport on the North Fork-a filmy gray sky, a gentle south breeze, and the stream neither too high nor too low. Powers fished moodily. He filled his boots, tore away his flies on overhead foliage, broke the tip of his rod, fought mosquitoes and punkies with excessive energy, and lost far more trout than he landed. He had relinquished cigarettes in favor of a pipe, and felt austerely virtuous. About the middle of the morning he left the stream and took his own way to the midday rendez

vous.

I did not miss him. Fish after fish rose to the fly, and I had a score of battles and a hundred skirmishes. One big fellow took my Black-gnat six inches in the air and fought cunningly and furiously for a quarter of an hour. I could not bring him to the net because a fallen tree sprawled across the brook, and I was forced to climb over it with infinite care and continue the battle in a broken run of water below. Then the sun came out and filtered through the trees like dripping gold. Birds burst into fuller song. The water became too clear for fishing, so I sat down within sight and sound of a merry cascade and opened my mind to any vagrant thoughts that cared to enter. Life seemed to be a very gracious and gentle thing in the aisle of green and gold fretwork, with music pouring upon me from every side and no duties or tasks for at least forty-eight hours ahead. And yet men-better and wiser than I--were throwing life away at that very moment on the clotted fields of Picardy! Was Amiens worth it? Are cathedrals any more to God than the bare conventicle? It took a considerable effort to throw off the spiritual vulgarity. "They are not dying for cities or for cathedrals; they are dying for life!"

Life! I could not define it. I could only feel it flowing into me-washing out all the nasty accumulations of the year, opening up the sealed fountains, tuning the slack strings of the harp, setting the eyes to a new focus, recasting prose into poetry, and erasing the border line between the temporal and the eternal, the physical and the spiritual. I seemed to know why the birds sing, and why the mother laughs in the midst of her pain when her babe is born, why springtime is a carnival of joy, and why the soldier shouts exultingly when he rushes into the crimson mist of battle. Yes, life is worth dying for!

The sun was high overhead, and I must move down-stream. But here and there a pool held me for a cast or two, and each rise meant a few minutes of delightful delay. At the foot of Indian Ladder Falls I creeled three splendid fish, and time was wiped out. Then I remembered Powers and Louis, and their unaccountable mutual animosity put a deep shadow upon my mind. I must hurry; there seemed no hope of pacifying or

reconciling them, but I might divert the talk into neutral channels.

Louis met me with radiant face. "Grub's ready," he said, "and Mr. Powers is mighty hungry. I mended that tip and showed him how to float his flies where the overhead is low. He landed several good-sized ones, an' he did it pretty clever, too. Quick on takin' up things, he is."

Here was my old Louis again-happy, enthusiastic, and generous. What had happened?

"An' he told me about the Liberty bonds and the sinkin' funds, an' why the next generations ought to pay some of the cost of the war, and how the other nations don't really get money from us but only credit, an' about how it was really our fight from the very beginnin', only our eyes were shut up with fat so as we couldn't see it-an' he put it all so straight an' clear that any ignoramus could take it in. He's some big man, is Mr. Powers."

I decided to take down my rod, simply to give Louis more time to talk.

"An' Mr. Powers has got two boys with Pershing!"

The words came out slowly, solemnly, and with finality, like a Supreme Court verdict.

"Two boys with Pershing!" Louis repeated, reverently. "Two boys with Pershing; all he's got in the world!"

During the afternoon I fished alone under a sky that rapidly grew darker until a gentle rain began to fall; a warm rain which almost instantly put a livelier green upon every living thing and filled the air with rare odors and changed the key in which the birds sang and brought out swarms of flies and gnats along the edge of the brook. The trout were less discriminating toward the lure, and they struck with more vigor. And I hummed as I fished-plaintive melodies which welled up unbidden from the lower chambers of memory; little ballads of sorrow lustered with joy and fear, fringed with hope; quaint memories of twilight peace such as the troubadours must have loved in their old age. I thought too of the new courage that had taken possession of the souls of men and women, a new courage which had its birth in a new valuation of all things, and which would lead us out into a new world where the only dead things would be the old slogans and shibboleths, the old distinctions and differentiations, the old orthodoxies and heresies. Louis, for instance, seemed to have passed out into that new world at a bound.

Powers joined me on the piazza of the Inn just before supper. "What's the prospect for to-morrow?" he asked with cheerful anxiety; "because Louis has promised to take me over to Shadow Lake if the weather is right, just to wipe out the remembrance of the bad time we had there yesterday. He wants me to break the record on casting from a boat."

Then, without waiting for answer or comment, the financier rattled on in a meditative but buoyant vein:

"How far is New York from here? Not in miles or hours, but in the art of living. And poor old Washington, with its muddle of red tape and its panting bureaucrats fussing like inspired futility in the name of democracy, and its amateurs persuading every one but the Huns that they are experts! They need Louis down there for a while. Some man, that guide of yours-never fools any one because he never fools himself, thinks straight because each word he knows has only one meaning, understands things because he never admits an opinion into his mind before having fought it all round on the assumption that it is false.

"Louis says the best point about fishing is that it starts you thinking of everything but the fish, and that just when you are thinking so deep that you are stirring up the mud at the bottom along comes a rise, and you have to rest your mind for a while; after that it goes back again into clear water. I can think enough in New York, but I can't stop thinking-thoughts never get checked up there. I'm going straight back from here and do something to win the war. What? Why, anything. For more than a year now I've wanted to correct everything that every duffer has done wrong; ached, literally ached to straighten out the messed-up ship-building programme, and then the machine-gun muddle, and after that the fuel fiasco; and all along I've fretted to start a kindergarten in business methods for the War Department. I've slept for months with the ghosts of whatmight-have-been-done-nights of nightmare. Yes, I'm going