He was almost out of sight when I remembered about there being bears on that mountain; so I rose and undertook to forge ahead too. I was not a great success at it however. I know now that if ever I should turn to a life of crime forgery would not be my forte. I do not forge readily. Eventually, though, I reached the summit, he being already there. We had come up for the view, but I seemed to have lost my interest in views; so, while he looked at the view, I reclined in a prostrate position and resumed panting. That was three years ago and I am still somewhat behind with my pants. I am going to take a week off sometime and pant steadily and try to catch up; but the outing taught me one thing—I learned a simple way of descending a steep mountain. If one is of a circular style of construction it is very simple. One rolls.
Camping is highly spoken of, and I have tried camping a number of times. When I go camping it rains. It begins to rain when I start and it keeps on raining until I come back. It never fails. I have often thought that drought-sufferers in various parts of the country who seek to attract rain in dry spells make a mistake. They try the old-fashioned Methodist way of praying for it, or the new scientific way of shooting dynamite bombs off and trying to blast it out of the heavens; when, as a matter of fact, the best plan would be to send for me and get me to go camping in the arid district. It would then rain heavily and without cessation.
It is a fine thing to talk about the perfumed and restful bed of balsam boughs, and the crackle of the campfire at dusk, and the dip in the mirrored bosom of the pellucid lake at dawn—old Emerson Hough does all that to perfection; but these things assume a different aspect when it rains. There are three conditions in life when any latent selfishness in a man's being, however far down it may be buried ordinarily, will come surging to the surface—when he is courting a girl against strong opposition; when he is playing a gentleman's game of poker, purely for sociability; and when he is camping out and it rains. Before a man makes up his mind that he will take a girl to be his wife he should induce her to go in surf bathing and see how she looks when she comes out; and before he makes up his mind that he will take a man to be his best friend he should go camping with him in the rainy season—the answer in both cases being that then he won't do either one.
I remember going camping once with a man who before that had appeared to be all that one could ask in the way of a chosen comrade; but after we had spent four days cooped up together in an eight-by-ten tent that was built with sloping shoulders, like an Englishman's overcoat, listening to the sough of the wind through the wet pine trees without, and dodging the streams of water that percolated through the dripping roof within, I could think of more than seven thousand things about that man that I cordially disliked.
His whiskers gradually became the most distasteful of all to me. Either he hadn't brought a razor along or it was too wet for shaving—or something; and his whiskers grew out, and they were bristly and red in color, which was something I had not suspected before. As I sat there with the little rivulets running down the back of my neck and the rust forming on my amalgam fillings and mold on my shoes and mushrooms sprouting under my hatband, it seemed to me that he had taken an unfair advantage of me by having red whiskers. Viewed through the drizzle they appeared to be the reddest, the most inflammatory, the most poisonous-looking whiskers I ever saw! They were too red to be natural.
I decided finally that he must have been scared by a Jersey bull so that his whiskers turned red in a single night—and I was getting ready to twit him about it; but he beat me to it. It seemed that all this time he had been feeling more and more deeply offended at the way in which my ears were adjusted to my head. He couldn't make up his mind, he said, which way he would hate me more—with my ears or without them; but he was willing to take a butcher knife and experiment. He also said that, as an expert bookkeeper, he wouldn't know whether to enter my ears as outstanding losses or amounts brought forward. Going into those woods we were just the same as Damon and Pythias; but coming out his bite would have been instant death, and I felt toward him exactly as the tarantula does toward the centipede. We were the original Blue-Gum Twins.
Coming now to aquatic sports as distinguished from pastimes ashore, I feel that I am better qualified to speak authoritatively, having had more experience in that direction. Let us start with canoeing. Canoeing is a sport fraught with constant surprises. A canoeing trip is rarely the same thing twice in succession; and particularly is this true in streams where the temperature of the water is subject to change. It is comparatively easy to paddle a canoe if you only remember to scoop toward you. You merely reverse the process by which truly refined people imbibe soup. Even if you never master the art of paddling you may still get along fairly well if you know how to swim. On the whole I would say that one is liable to enjoy a longer career as a canoeist where one swims but can't paddle, than where one paddles but can't swim.
Approaching the subject of motor-boating as compared with sailboating, we find the situation becoming complicated and growing technical. In sailing, as is generally known, you depend upon the wind; and there are only two things the wind does—one is to blow and the other is not to blow. But when you begin to figure up the things that a motor boat will do when you don't want it to, and won't do when you do want it to, you are face to face with one of the most complicated mathematical jobs known to the realm of mechanical science.
A motor boat undoubtedly has a larger and fancier repertoire of cute tricks and unexpected ways than anything in the nature of machinery. I know this to be true, because I have a relative who suffers from motor-boatitis in an advanced form. He has owned many different brands of motor boats—that is one reason, I think, why he is not wealthier; in fact he has had about all the kinds there are except a kind that will start when you wish it to and stop when you expect it to. His motor boats do nearly everything—backfire, and fail to spark, and clog up, and blow up, and break down, and smash up and drift ashore, and drift out from shore, and have the asthma and the heaves and impediments of speech; but he has never yet owned one that could be depended upon to do the two things I have just mentioned.
After trying various models and discarding them, he now has one of the most complete motor boats made. It has what is known as a hunting cabin, it being so called, I think, because the moment anybody gets into it he has to get out again while the owner crawls in and takes up all the seats and hunts for something. It is the theory that one could live afloat in this hunting cabin—and so one could if one were only a dachshund and inured to exposure. It is plenty wide enough for the average dachshund and plenty high enough, too, but not more than about two-thirds long enough. If one were a dachshund one would either have to coil up or else remain partly outdoors. Also, on board is a galley, which would be a success in every way if you could find a style of cook who could get used to sitting on one hole of the stove while he cooked on the other. One of those talented parlor magicians who does light housekeeping in a borrowed high hat by breaking raw eggs into it and then taking out omelet souffles, might fill the bill—only I never have chanced to see a parlor magician yet who could crowd himself and his feet into that galley at the same time.