Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/91

Rh the study of the seaweeds, and the chaperon, a cheery old lady, the mother of the sub-director. I look into the big room in the living house and note the great fire-place with a big settee on each side, which promises solid comfort in the cool evenings.

With the director I go to the laboratories, where we find three rooms, in all of which students are hard at work. Here are tables, microscopes, reagents, books and other laboratory apparatus, and the rooms look much like the laboratories in the colleges and universities, except that here the furniture is roughly made by carpenters. We go down to the beach and take a close view of the seaweeds, the hermit crabs, sea anemones and star fishes. We look up and note the gigantic size of the trees which form the forest background. We hear the clangor of a bell, and the director suggests that we hurry back to camp, for that is the noonday dinner signal. He takes us by the men's 'lavatory,' which is a quiet brook near one of the laboratories. Towels and soap are here in profusion, for every man supplies his own. Here, day by day. the men perform their ablutions and make their toilets. The water is always abundant and the toilet room is never overcrowded!

The dinner served in the big room was quite characteristic of our camp life. On each side of two long tables were long plain benches. Over these we stepped to our assigned places. Potatoes, turnips and bacon, with bread, butter and tea, all in generous quantities, constituted the substantial meal. It was a merry meal, as were all our meals. When twenty-two hungry campers sit down to a 'square meal' there is always much jollity. Dinner over, the noonday lecture was announced to take place in a shady spot two hundred yards from the camp. It was given by the director, who sat on a log, and talked to us on the characteristics of the spruce, hemlock and fir trees of the region, while his audience sat on other logs or on the ground near him. Above us are the trees under discussion, and at our feet are the cones which have fallen from them. So we have a bit of out-door laboratory work while listening to the lecture. When we break up, some go to the laboratories, while others stroll over the rocks hunting for specimens.