ck of the cock is almost sure
to explode the cap, while a gun at half-cock is comparatively safe.

Don't carry too many eatables on your expeditions. Dr. Kane says his
party learned to modify and reduce their travelling-gear, and found that
in direct proportion to its simplicity and to their apparent privation
of articles of supposed necessity were their actual comfort and
practical efficiency. Step by step, as long as their Arctic service
continued, they went on reducing their sledging-outfit, until they at
last came to the Esquimaux ultimatum of simplicity,--_raw meat and a fur
bag_. Salt and pepper are needful condiments. Nearly all the rest are
out of place on a roughing expedition. Among the most portable kinds of
solid food are pemmican, jerked meat, wheat flour, barley, peas, cheese,
and biscuit. Salt meat is a disappointing dish, and apt to be sadly
uncertain. Somebody once said that water had tasted of sinners ever
since the flood, and salted meat sometimes has a taint full as vivid.
Twenty-eight ounces of real nutriment _per diem_ for a man in rough
work as a traveller will be all that he requires; if he perform severe
tramping, thirty ounces.

The French say, _C'est la soupe qui fait le soldat_, and we have always
found on a tramping expedition nothing so life-restoring after fatigue
and hunger as the portable soup now so easily obtained at places where
prepared food is put up for travellers' uses. Spirituous liquors are no
help in roughing it. On the contrary, they invite sunstroke, and various
other unpleasant visitors incident to the life of a traveller. Habitual
brandy-drinkers give out sooner than cold-water men, and we have seen
fainting red noses by the score succumb to the weather, when boys
addicted to water would crow like chanticleer through a long storm of
sleet and snow on the freezing Alps.

It is not well to lose your way; but in case this unpleasant luck befall
you, set _systematically_ to work to find it. Throw terror to the idiots
who always flutter and flounder, and so go wrong inevitably. Galton the
Plucky says,--and he has as much cool wisdom to impart as a traveller
needs,--when you make the unlively discovery that you are lost, ask
yourself the three following questions:--

1. What is the least distance that I can with certainty specify, within
which the path, the river, the sea-shore, etc., that I wish to regain,
lies?

2. What is the direction, in a vague, general way, in which t