There Are, Those Who Would Like To Live
In This Free Fashion Forever, Taking Rain And Sun As Heaven Pleases;
And There Are Some Souls So Constituted That They Cannot Exist More
Than Three Days Without Their Worldly - Baggage.
Taking the party
altogether, from one cause or another it is likely to strike camp
sooner than was intended.
And the stricken camp is a melancholy
sight. The woods have been despoiled; the stumps are ugly; the
bushes are scorched; the pine-leaf-strewn earth is trodden into mire;
the landing looks like a cattle-ford; the ground is littered with all
the unsightly dibris of a hand-to-hand life; the dismantled shanty is
a shabby object; the charred and blackened logs, where the fire
blazed, suggest the extinction of family life. Man has wrought his
usual wrong upon Nature, and he can save his self-respect only by
moving to virgin forests.
And move to them he will, the next season, if not this. For he who
has once experienced the fascination of the woods-life never escapes
its enticement: in the memory nothing remains but its charm.
VII
A WILDERNESS ROMANCE
At the south end of Keene Valley, in the Adirondacks, stands Noon
Mark, a shapely peak thirty-five hundred feet above the sea, which,
with the aid of the sun, tells the Keene people when it is time to
eat dinner. From its summit you look south into a vast wilderness
basin, a great stretch of forest little trodden, and out of whose
bosom you can hear from the heights on a still day the loud murmur of
the Boquet.
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