going we had not the slightest idea; the margin of the lake
was easy travelling, so easy that we never noticed that we had already
gone around the lake three times, until Mrs. Batt recognized the fact and
turned on us furiously.

I didn't know how to explain it, except to say feebly that I was doing it
as a sort of preliminary canter to harden and inure the ladies.

"We don't need hardening!" she snarled. "Do you understand that!"

I comprehended that at once. But I forced a sickly smile and skipped
forward in the wake of my mule, with something of the same abandon
which characterizes the flight of an unwelcome dog.

In the terrified ear of Kitten I voiced my doubts concerning the
prospects of a pleasant journey.

We marched in the following order: Arthur, the heavily laden mule,
led; then came Kitten Brown and myself, all hung over with stew-pans,
shotguns, rifles, cartridge-belts, ponchos, and the toilet reticules of
the ladies; then marched the Reverend Dr. Jones, and, in order, filing
behind her, Miss Dingleheimer, Mrs. Batt, Miss McFadden, and Miss
White--the latter in her trained nurse's costume and wearing a red cross
on her sleeve--an idea of Mrs. Batt, who believed in emergency methods.

Mrs. Batt also bore a banner, much interfered with by the foliage,
bearing the inscription:

EQUAL RIGHTS!
EUGENICS OR EXTERMINATION!

After a while she shouted:

"Guide! Here, you may carry this banner for a while! I'm tired."

Kitten and I took turns with it after that. It was hard work,
particularly as one by one in turn they came up and hung their parasols
and shopping reticules all over us. We plodded forward like a pair of
moving department stores, not daring to shift our burdens to Arthur,
because we had already stuffed into the panniers of that simple and
dignified animal all our collecting boxes, cyanide jars, butterfly nets,
note-books, reels of piano wire, thermometers, barometers, hydrometers,
stereometers, aeronoids, adnoids--everything, in fact, that guides are
not supposed to pack into the woods, but which we had smuggled unbeknown
to those misguided ones we guided.

And, to make room for our scientific paraphernalia, we had been obliged
to do a thing so mean, so inexpressibly low, that I blush to relate it.
But facts are facts; we discarded nearly a ton of feminine impedimenta.
There was fancy work of all sorts in the making or in the raw--materials
for knitting, embroidering, tatting, sewing, h