Your shirt will dry quickest and easiest. Wearing that, you can dry the rest of your clothes at the fire, the lightest first. If your boots are soaked it is better not to try and dry them by a fire. Leather liketh not fire. There is little harm in wearing wet boots and trusting them to dry themselves as best they can.
It is a happy occasion, this of drying off. One’s spirits are naturally exalted by it. It is victory of a kind. The tramp sings as he circles the fire. There is a music which belongs to the mood, and it is a pity no great musician has composed “While waiting for my clothes to dry by an early morning fire.” The musicians have not tramped enough.
However, in this light-hearted frolic, let us not allow our linen to be ruined. Beware of the long flames which try to lick your trousers as they hang there in the wind; beware of the scorching heat which browns and ruins a shirt; beware of the showers of sparks which rise when you throw a new log on the fire. For some good reason, sparks are more plentiful after rain than in the dry. Your fire may be sending up sparks all the while, big, substantial living sparks, which, settling on your drying blanket, may fret it with holes. I have had a blanket made holey by this before now. The spark settles on the wool, ignites it gently, and starts a hole which may be as big as a cigar end before you notice it. As the blanket gets nearer being perfectly dry you need to retire it from the intimate ardors of the fire. Your fire, in any case, has been getting hotter and hotter. You have not noticed that it is beginning to scorch your clothes and your wraps.
That is the way of drying off. It suits all weathers. But if, while you are engaged upon it, the sun breaks forth, promising natural heat, you may relax your energies from the fireside and place your hopes on the morning warmth. Nothing is more delightful than the sun bath after rain. You enjoy it, your clothes enjoy it, blanket enjoys it, knapsack enjoys it, coffee enjoys it. As you are all spread out on the hillside the butterflies settle on your bare chest trying to take honey from you, and flit thence to the knapsack which, perchance moistened with sugar, gives an even pleasanter reaction to the proboscis of a Vanessa.
A third dry-off is in a farmhouse at the kindly hands of a farm wife, who hangs your blanket and jacket in her kitchen, while her husband regales you in the parlor with homebrew and a hunk of fruit pie.
There are other less satisfactory ways of drying; using newspapers as blotting paper and stuffing the legs of your trousers with them. But first find your dry newspapers. Another method is to get up into a tree and sit there till you are dry. The last I have tried, but shivered so steadily that I gave it up, resumed my way, and walked myself dry. It is part of a genuine tramping outing to get once thoroughly wet—and dry off.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
MARCHING SONGS
MAN is a singing animal, but civilization has silenced many songs. In so many places I see exposed the lugubrious mourning card—SILENCE! Silence in court, silence in the office! How annoyed we can get to feel when some one begins singing in a carriage of a train. We crave silence and our newspapers, silence and our pipes. We will not sing or listen to singing on the way to our work. Indeed, singing is not fitting; we might rather sing coming home but not going out. But coming home, we are all in too much of a hurry, and the crowds irritate us, and we have not had our supper. To tell the truth, we had but a slight lunch and no wine. We never got into the singing mood.