Letter X
From the Lady Helen Pole to the Countess of Edge and Ross.
Chipmunk Lake,
August 19th
Dearest Polly:
IT is eleven o’clock P. M., and I have been in bed and asleep since half-after seven. I foresee myself wide-awake for two hours and giving you an account of the last two days. How flat that sounds—but wait! And otherwise you might never hear of them, for I return to Boulder Lake to-morrow, and in this country events are so quickly crowded into the past.
I wrote you—did I not?—that the subject of a camping expedition had been mooted more than once, but put off from time to time on account of threatening weather and various other causes. I longed to go; “camping out” in the “Adirondack wilderness” being pitched upon a most adventurous and romantic note; and finally I begged Mr. Nugent to arrange it. He went “straight at it” in the energetic American way, and in two hours it was all arranged: Opp drove out in the buckboard for another guide, and Mrs. Opp was making so many good things at once that all the other cooks had to come over to help her. Then Mr. Nugent and Mr. Van Worden packed the big pack-baskets, and everybody was ready to start at nine o’clock the day before yesterday.
The original plan was that all of us should go, but the actual party were Mr. and Mrs. Meredith Jones, Miss Page, Myself, Mr. Nugent, Mr. Latimer, and Mr. Van Worden. The others “backed out” on one excuse or another, and happy it was for them and us that they did.
This colony is only two years old, and, as it happened, none of the men ever had camped out in this part of the Adirondacks before, and as they found their lake and surroundings quite sufficient there was not a tent on the place. However—and the expedition was avowedly got up for my benefit—I insisted that I wanted a genuine rough camping experience, and we all took Opp’s word for it that he knew the very spot—where there was fishing, a clearing, and an “open camp,” erected by other wood-loving spirits. It is true he grinned as he assured me that I would get a good taste of the “genuine article,” but I suspected nothing. What imagination, indeed, would be equal to it!
Mrs. Coward kissed me good-bye quite affectionately, for she expected to “go out” before I returned, and even Mrs. Earle stood on the shore in the little spruce grove and waved her handkerchief with the others as we rowed down the lake.
It was one of those crystal mornings when life seems the divine thing of those imaginings of ours when we have lost for a little the links that hold them to facts. I never felt happier, I was almost excited. It seemed such a delightful thing to float off into the unknown like that, to go in search of adventures, with the certainty that six strong men, one of them your devoted slave, would take the best of care of you. It was all so undiscovered—that rough mountain world beyond the lake—so unimaginable—well, I know all about it now.