These pests will annoy you exceedingly almost everywhere in the summer. In the daytime motion and perspiration keep them off to some extent. At night, or when lying down, you can do no better than to cover yourself so that they cannot reach your body, and have a mosquito-bar of some sort over your head. The simplest thing is a square yard of mosquito-netting thrown over the head, and tucked in well. You will need to have your hat first thrown over the head, and your shirt-collar turned up, to prevent the mosquitoes reaching through the mesh to your face and neck.
A better way than this is to make a box-shaped mosquito-bar, large enough to stretch across the head of the bed, and cover the heads and shoulders of all that sleep in the tent. It should be six or eight feet long, twenty to twenty-six inches wide, and one yard or more high. It will be more durable, but not quite so well ventilated, if the top is made of light cloth instead of netting. The seams should be bound with stout tape, and the sides and ends "gathered" considerably in sewing them to the top. Even then the side that falls over the shoulders of the sleepers may not be loose enough to fill the hollows between them; the netting will then have to be tucked under the blanket, or have something thrown over its lower edge.
Sew loops or strings on the four upper corners, and corresponding loops or strings on the tent, so that you can tie up the bar.
Bobbinet lace is better than the common netting for all of these purposes. It comes in pieces twelve to fourteen yards long, and two yards wide. You cannot often find it for sale; but the large shops in the principal cities that do a great business by correspondence can send it to you.
Oil of cedar and oil of pennyroyal are recommended as serviceable in driving off mosquitoes, and there are patented compounds whose labels pretend great things: you will try them only once, I think.
Ammoniated opodeldoc rubbed upon the bites will in a great measure stop the itching, and hasten the cure.
They say that a little gunpowder flashed in the tent will drive out flies and mosquitoes. I saw a man try it once, but noticed that he himself went out in a great hurry, while the flies, if they went at all, were back again before he was.
A better thing, really the best, is a smudge made by building a small fire to the windward of your tent, and nearly smothering it with chips, moss, bark, or rotten wood. If you make the smudge in an old pan or pot, you can move it about as often as the wind changes.
HOW TO SKIN FISH.
When you camp by the seaside, you will catch cunners and other fish that need skinning. Let no one persuade you to slash the back fins out with a single stroke, as you would whittle a stick; but take a sharp knife, cut on both sides of the fin, and then pull out the whole of it from head to tail, and thus save the trouble that a hundred little bones will make if left in. After cutting the skin on the under side from head to tail, and taking out the entrails and small fins, start the skin where the head joins the body, and pull it off one side at a time. Some men stick an awl through a cunner's head, or catch it fast in a stout iron hook, to hold it while skinning.