and how to
roast a trout in the ashes and serve him hot and juicy and clean, and
how to cook soup and prepare coffee and heat dish-water in one tin-pail,
were vital problems.

THE PARSON. You would have had no such problems at home. Why will people
go so far to put themselves to such inconvenience? I hate the woods.
Isolation breeds conceit; there are no people so conceited as those who
dwell in remote wildernesses and live mostly alone.

THE YOUNG LADY. For my part, I feel humble in the presence of mountains,
and in the vast stretches of the wilderness.

THE PARSON. I'll be bound a woman would feel just as nobody would expect
her to feel, under given circumstances.

MANDEVILLE. I think the reason why the newspaper and the world it
carries take no hold of us in the wilderness is that we become a kind of
vegetable ourselves when we go there. I have often attempted to improve
my mind in the woods with good solid books. You might as well offer a
bunch of celery to an oyster. The mind goes to sleep: the senses and the
instincts wake up. The best I can do when it rains, or the trout won't
bite, is to read Dumas's novels. Their ingenuity will almost keep a man
awake after supper, by the camp-fire. And there is a kind of unity about
them that I like; the history is as good as the morality.

OUR NEXT DOOR. I always wondered where Mandeville got his historical
facts.

THE MISTRESS. Mandeville misrepresents himself in the woods. I heard him
one night repeat "The Vision of Sir Launfal"--(THE FIRE-TENDER. Which
comes very near being our best poem.)--as we were crossing the lake, and
the guides became so absorbed in it that they forgot to paddle, and sat
listening with open mouths, as if it had been a panther story.

THE PARSON. Mandeville likes to show off well enough. I heard that he
related to a woods' boy up there the whole of the Siege of Troy. The
boy was very much interested, and said "there'd been a man up there that
spring from Troy, looking up timber." Mandeville always carries the news
when he goes into the country.

MANDEVILLE. I'm going to take the Parson's sermon on Jonah next summer;
it's the nearest to anything like news we've had from his pulpit in ten
years. But, seriously, the boy was very well informed. He'd heard of
Albany; his father took in the "Weekly Tribune," and he had a partial
conception of Horace Greeley.

OUR NEXT DOOR. I never went so far out of the world in America yet that
the name of Ho