Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/409

 JET. 40.] TO T. W. HIGGINSON. 383

To save time, the sugar, coffee, tea, salt, etc., should be in separate watertight bags, labeled, and tied with a leathern string ; and all the pro visions and blankets should be put into two large India-rubber bags, if you can find them watertight. Ours were not. A four-quart tin pail makes a good kettle for all purposes, and tin plates are portable and convenient. Don t forget an India-rubber knapsack, with a large flap, plenty of dish-cloths, old newspapers, strings, and twenty-five feet of strong cord. Of India-rubber clothing, the most you can wear, if any, is a very light coat, and that you cannot work in. I could be more particular, but per haps have been too much so already.

Of his habits in mountain-climbing, Channing says : l &quot; He ascended such hills as Monadnoc by his own path ; would lay down his map on the summit and draw a line to the point he pro posed to visit below, perhaps forty miles away on the landscape, and set off bravely to make the c short-cut. The lowland people wondered to

knapsacks being unspaced. After trying the merit of cocoa, coffee, water, and the like, tea was put down as the felicity of a walking travail, tea plenty, strong, with enough sugar, made in a tin pint cup. He commended every party to carry a junk of heavy cake with plums in it, having found by long experience that after toil it was a capital refreshment.&quot; 1 Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist, pp. 36-38.