r ones.
The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and
delicious. And why shouldn't it be?--it is the same the angels breathe.
I think that hardly any amount of fatigue can be gathered together that a
man cannot sleep off in one night on the sand by its side. Not under a
roof, but under the sky; it seldom or never rains there in the summer
time. I know a man who went there to die. But he made a failure of it.
He was a skeleton when he came, and could barely stand. He had no
appetite, and did nothing but read tracts and reflect on the future.
Three months later he was sleeping out of doors regularly, eating all he
could hold, three times a day, and chasing game over mountains three
thousand feet high for recreation. And he was a skeleton no longer, but
weighed part of a ton. This is no fancy sketch, but the truth. His
disease was consumption. I confidently commend his experience to other
skeletons.

I superintended again, and as soon as we had eaten breakfast we got in
the boat and skirted along the lake shore about three miles and
disembarked. We liked the appearance of the place, and so we claimed
some three hundred acres of it and stuck our "notices" on a tree. It was
yellow pine timber land--a dense forest of trees a hundred feet high and
from one to five feet through at the butt. It was necessary to fence our
property or we could not hold it. That is to say, it was necessary to
cut down trees here and there and make them fall in such a way as to form
a sort of enclosure (with pretty wide gaps in it). We cut down three
trees apiece, and found it such heart-breaking work that we decided to
"rest our case" on those; if they held the property, well and good; if
they didn't, let the property spill out through the gaps and go; it was
no use to work ourselves to death merely to save a few acres of land.
Next day we came back to build a house--for a house was also necessary,
in order to hold the property. We decided to build a substantial
log-house and excite the envy of the Brigade boys; but by the time we had
cut and trimmed the first log it seemed unnecessary to be so elaborate,
and so we concluded to build it of saplings. However, two saplings, duly
cut and trimmed, compelled recognition of the fact that a still modester
architecture would satisfy the law, and so we concluded to build a
"brush" house. We devoted the next day to this work, but we did so much
"sitting around" and discus