nsider it
for a moment; you undertake to eat simply, to endure much, to lie on
the rack of anxiety; you voluntarily place yourself where cold, wet,
hunger, thirst, heat, monotony, danger, and many discomforts will wait
upon you daily. A thousand times in the course of a woods life even
the stoutest-hearted will tell himself softly--very softly if he is
really stout-hearted, so that others may not be annoyed--that if ever
the fates permit him to extricate himself he will never venture again.

These times come when long continuance has worn on the spirit. You
beat all day to windward against the tide toward what should be but an
hour's sail: the sea is high and the spray cold; there are sunken
rocks, and food there is none; chill gray evening draws dangerously
near, and there is a foot of water in the bilge. You have swallowed
your tongue twenty times on the alkali; and the sun is melting hot, and
the dust dry and pervasive, and there is no water, and for all your
effort the relative distances seem to remain the same for days. You
have carried a pack until your every muscle is strung white-hot; the
woods are breathless; the black flies swarm persistently and bite until
your face is covered with blood. You have struggled through clogging
snow until each time you raise your snowshoe you feel as though some
one had stabbed a little sharp knife into your groin; it has come to be
night; the mercury is away below zero, and with aching fingers you are
to prepare a camp which is only an anticipation of many more such camps
in the ensuing days. For a week it has rained, so that you, pushing
through the dripping brush, are soaked and sodden and comfortless, and
the bushes have become horrible to your shrinking goose-flesh. Or you
are just plain tired out, not from a single day's fatigue, but from the
gradual exhaustion of a long hike. Then in your secret soul you utter
these sentiments:--

"You are a fool. This is not fun. There is no real reason why you
should do this. If you ever get out of here, you will stick right home
where common sense flourishes, my son!"

Then after a time you do get out, and are thankful. But in three months
you will have proved in your own experience the following axiom--I
should call it the widest truth the wilderness has to teach:--

"In memory the pleasures of a camping trip strengthen with time, and
the disagreeables weaken."

I don't care how hard an experience you have had, nor how l