The Honest Man already had in stock a 12 × 14 tent, and a small A-tent. The Lazy Man bought a 10 × 12 tent for himself and wife, and the next size smaller for his daughter. Each family brought bed-clothing and personal apparel. (It was a first-rate opportunity to wear out old clothes.) The communal property, dishes, oil-stove, egg-beaters, and all such were paid for half-and-half. It stood the Lazy Man for outfit just $49.27 all told, and the outfit is now down cellar waiting impatiently for summer to come again, when it will be as good as new and won’t cost anything.
The summer previous, the Honest Man had gone exploring and found a spot on the Canadian shore of Lake Erie within an hour’s ride on the steamer from his business. A whopping big maple tree, thick and umbrageous, stood a hundred feet or so back from the water’s edge, on a sand slope carpeted with wild grape vines. The beach was of fine white sand, without a pebble bigger than a moth-ball, and it slanted so slowly into the water that breast-deep was fully a hundred yards from shore. This made it rather poky for the men-folks when they went in swimming, but it was ideal for the women, to whom a foot of depth is drowning depth. The lake being soft water, nobody can adequately express the joy the women had in washing their hair. This favored spot was a shade more than a mile away from the steamboat pier at which, six or eight times a day, excursion steamers unloaded revelers who sought the pallid ecstasy of a non-alcoholic pleasure resort. (It was Canada, remember, and while you might go in swimming on the Lord’s day, you could not ride upon the giddy-go-round. A district attorney from the smoky city on the American side presumed to fish on Sunday, and got sassy to the constable who said he shouldn’t. Thereupon they snaked him off to a neighboring village to the hardware store where the ’Squire kept court and fined him $20 and the costs.) We were far enough away on the long board walk to miss the transients, and by looking carefully through the trees you could just see one house from our place, the castle of our landlord. I am aware that it’s nice to be exclusive, and get away from common folks, but it’s so blamed expensive. Even millionaires when they want to make sure of getting any place have to travel with the cheap crowd. You can think that over. You will find it’s so, although I haven’t time to work it out in detail.
The Honest Man having lived on this spot the summer before, the floors were laid of boughten lumber, and the frames were up. Also, the private walks, made of such bits of board as the Good Lord had pleased to send upon the rolling waves, nailed upon saplings from the wood back of the camp, were still in place, so that there wasn’t much to do, a circumstance that grieved the Honest Man no little. He liked to be busy. The Lazy Man was patient under this affliction. He did help when there were things to do. He got the nails and handed the hatchet, and generally fetched and carried, knowing full well what are the drawbacks incident to being a heaven-gifted literary genius, such as not being of the least account about a place.
Among the triumphs of the Honest Man’s saw and hammer were the tables, prime among them being the dining-table under the same maple tree, whereon we ate our every meal from July 2 until September 3. It is fitting that in this public manner I should return thanks for our kind and considerate treatment by the weather. I can cheerfully recommend it to all and sundry. It rained at times, I won’t deny. It had to. I can see that. But I must say it was most forbearing in the matter, and rained only out of meal hours. Once or twice it was plain to see that it strained a point in our behalf, for example, that time we had to have our Sunday ice-cream in our tents, and the two or three occasions when the breakfast dishes were practically storm-washed.
This dining-table, the serving-table, the table in the cook-tent, and the china-closet—Oh my yes! We had a china-closet. It was made out of a packing box, had shelves in it, and four plank legs—these articles of furniture were covered with marbled oil-cloth, and the door of the china-closet was of the same rich material, being secured with loops and nails. The cook-tent reared its lofty A on a frame with a waist-high board-wall, lined with shelves. It was so studded with nails that for once in their lives the women were speechless of complaint that there weren’t places enough to bestow the junk without which, so it seems, life in the kitchen is insupportable.
Hard by the china-closet was the refrigerator, in whose construction, let me say, the Lazy Man bore his part. He dug the hole in the sand in which was sunk a barrel with a perforated bottom through which the melting ice drained off. The women professed they lay awake nights listening for the things piled upon the ice to topple over into smash. They had to worry about something. There wasn’t a thing else for them to do but cook, and make the beds and wash the dishes.
I suppose that cooking by a camp-fire is the extreme of picturesqueness. It is also mighty hard upon the back, to say nothing of its blinding you with smoke, and frying the grease out of your face, even after you have learned that it isn’t really necessary to have a conflagration big enough to melt the nose off the coffee-pot, but that a cupful of live coals and a tiny bunch of twigs will do the trick. You have to stand over such a fire to keep it going, and when it rains it is the deuce and all. So we had a blue-flame oil-stove with an oven, and had everything cooked in the highest style known to the art, just as it was before we started on our way back to Nature. There was just one thing the women missed. Endless hot water laid on. Their heaviest burden was to remember “the dying woman’s advice.” Don’t you know what that is? “Sally,” she whispered with her latest breath, “always put on the dish-water before you sit down to your victuals.”
But if the Lazy Man could not bring his mind to penning deathless Literatoor, he could at least tote water from the lake, so it wasn’t so bad after all.
The need of cooking was great indeed. In no spirit of carping criticism I desire to say that I have seen the Honest Man, many and many’s the time, wolf down six big potatoes at a meal and other things accordingly. We others did our feeble best, but we never quite compassed that. I did eat six ears of green corn once, but you must remember that they were right off the vines, as you might say, and you know how good green corn is when it’s fresh.
This was no lonesome wilderness wherein we had to scuffle for our food. The milkman came right after breakfast with the morning’s milk. The morning’s milk remember, not the night before’s. Then came the iceman. I want to tell you about him. I had seen him pushing the lawn-mower on a green velvet lawn before a mansion up the beach a ways. I thought he was turning an honest penny taking care of it for some one else. Bless your heart, he lived there. He had a fine big farm behind it, but it was all seeded down in grass, because the harvest of ice from the lake before him in the winter brought him more money for less work than the rich loam behind him could raise in summer crops. Then came the grocer from the village back in the country. He always brought us kerosene, sometimes he brought us groceries, and all too seldom he brought us the flat loaves of the Italian baker in the village, flat and crusty loaves, which the grocer scornfully called “dog-bread.” There was “the bearded lady” that brought us home-made bread just once—just once. Evidently she had confused the relative proportions of the yeast and flour. Then came the old man with the broken hand, talk about which shortened the day for him and us; also, his wife, a dear old soul, who sold us from time to time bouquets picked from her garden, old-fashioned flowers made up so round and hard that if a man were clouted on the head with a nosegay you’d have to take him to the hospital. There was “the bonnet lady,” a sweet-faced Dunkard in the habit of her faith. There were several whom we came to know right well, and after they began to suspect that, like as not, we weren’t as crazy as we seemed, living in tents—Did you ever hear the beat of that?—they showed they were just folks, same as anybody else. But the one I liked the best was the man that came on Saturdays to fetch us eggs and butter. I aroused his interest by telling him that where I came from they sold eggs by quarter’s worth; so many for a quarter, more when eggs were cheap, fewer when eggs were dear. Well sir, he like to never got over that. It was like the returned missionary, telling how the poor heathens live in China. He was a very conscientious man. “I’m sorry,” he would say, “but I’ve got to charge you 21 cents for them there eggs. They ain’t worth it. No eggs is worth that much, no time o’year. They ortn’t to be more’n 18 cents at any time. But the others is sellin’ ’em for 21, and I s’pose I got to, too.”