Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 9.djvu/194

 174

��A Summer on the Great Lakes.

��as far removed from servility as forward- ness. Some of these men are strikingly handsome, with shapely statuesque figures that recall the Antinous and the Apollo Belvidere. Their life is neces- sarily a hard one, exposed as they are to all sorts of weather and the dangers incidental to their profession. At a comparatively early age they break down, and extended excursions are left to the younger and more active mem- bers of the fraternity.

Camping-out, provided the weather is reasonably agreeable, is one of the most delightful and healthful ways to spend vacation. It is a sort of wood- man's or frontier life. It means living in a tent, sleeping on boughs or leaves, cooking your own meals, washing your own dishes and clothes perhaps, get- ting up your own fuel, making your own fire, and foraging for your own proven- der. It means activity, variety, novelty, and fun alive ; and the more you have of it the more you like it ; and the longer you stay the less willing you are to give it up. There is a freedofh in it that you do not get elsewhere. All the stiff formalties of conventional life are put aside : you are left free to enjoy yourself as you choose. All in all, it is the very best way we know to enjoy a "glorious vacation."

At Duluth, at Sault de Ste. Marie, at Mackinaw, at Saginaw, we wandered away days at a time, with nothing but our birch canoe, rifles, and fishing-rods, and for provisions, hard bread, pork, potatoes, coffee, tea, rice, butter, and sugar, closely packed. Any camper- out can make himself comfortable with

��an outfit as simple as the one named. How memory clings around some of those bright spots we visited ! I pass over them again, in thought, as I write these lines, longing to nestle amid them forever.

Following along the coast, now in small yachts hired for the occasion, now in a birch canoe of our own, we passed from one village to another. Where\eT we happened to be at night, we en- camped. Many a time it was on a lonely shore. Standing at sunset on a pleasant strand, more than once we saw the glow of the vanished sun behind the western mountains or the western waves, darkly piled in mist and shadow along the sky ; near at hand, the dead pine, mighty in decay, stretch- ing its ragged arms athwart the burning heavens, the crow perched on its top like an image carved in jet; and aloft, the night-hawk, circling in his flight, and, with a strange whining sound, diving through the air each moment for the insects he makes his prey.

But all good things, as well as others, have an end. The season drew to a close at last. August nights are chilly for sleeping in tents. Our flitting must cease, and our thoughts and steps turn homeward. But a few days are still left us. At Buffalo once more we go to see the Falls. Then by boat to Hamilton, thence to Kingston at the foot of the lake, and so on through the Tiiousand Isles to Montreal, and finally to Quebec, — a tour as fascinat- ing in its innumerable and singularly wild and beautiful " sights " as heart could desire.

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