it waxed strong. Then we put in a
good deal of time feeding and nursing our charge and making it warm and
comfortable before we considered ourselves. And how did the ungrateful
thing repay us? By filling our eyes with smoke and chasing us from side
to side, pursuing us even behind trees to blind and torture us with its
acrid smarting vapors. In fact, the perversity of campfire smoke remains
one of the unexplained mysteries. I have seen a fire properly built
between two tents--with good draught and the whole wide sky to hold the
smoke--suddenly send a column of suffocating vapor directly into the
door of the tent, where there was no draught, no room, no demand at all
for smoke. I have had it track me into the remotest corner of my
sleeping-bag and have found it waiting for me when I came up for a
breath of air. I have had it come clear around the tent to strangle me
when I had taken refuge on the back side. I have had it follow me
through the bushes, up a tree, over a cliff----

As I was saying, we got the fire going. After that the rest was easy. It
was simply a matter of cleaning a few trout, sticking them on sticks and
fighting the smoke fiend with one hand while we burnt and blackened the
trout a little with the other, and ate them, _sans_ salt, _sans_ fork,
_sans_ knife, _sans_ everything. Not that they were not good. I have
never eaten any better raw, unsalted trout anywhere, not even at
Delmonico's.

[Illustration: "It's all in a day's camping, of course."]

The matter of getting dry and warm was different. It is not the
pleasantest thing in the world, even by a very respectable fire such as
we had now achieved, to take off all of one's things without the
protection of a tent, especially when the woods are damp and trickly and
there is a still small breath of chill wind blowing, and to have to hop
and skip, on one foot and then on the other, to keep the circulation
going while your things are on a limb in the smoke, getting scalded and
fumigated, and black edged here and there where the flame has singed up
high. It's all in a day's camping, of course, and altogether worth
while, but when the shades of night are closing in and one is still
doing a spectral dance about a dying fire, in a wet wood, on a stomach
full of raw trout, then the camping day seems pretty long and there is
pressing need of other diversion.

It was well toward night when we decided that our clothes were scorched
enough for comfortable wear