Roughing it has various meanings, and the phrase is oftentimes ludicrously mistaken by many individuals.  A friend with whom we once travelled thought he was roughing it daily for the space of three weeks, because he was obliged to lunch on cold chicken and un-iced Champagne, and when it rained he was forced to seek shelter inside very inelegant hotels on the road.  To rough it, in the best sense of that term, is to lie down every night with the ground for a mattress, a bundle of fagots for a pillow, and the stars for a coverlet.  To sleep in a tent is semi-luxury, and tainted with too much effeminacy to suit the ardor of a first-rate “Rough.”  Parkyns, Taylor, Gumming, Fremont, and Kane have told us how much superior are two trunks of trees, rolled together for a bed, under the open sky, to that soft heating apparatus called a bed in the best chamber.  Every man to his taste,—­of course, but there come occasions in life when a man must look about him and arrange for himself, somehow.  The traveller who has never slept in the woods has missed an enjoyable sensation.  A clump of trees makes a fine leafy post-bedstead, and to awake in the morning amid a grove of sheltering nodding oaks is lung-inspiring.  It was the good thought of a wanderer to say, “The forest is the poor man’s jacket.”  Napoleon had a high opinion of the bivouac style of life, and on the score of health gave it the preference over tent-sleeping.  Free circulation is a great blessing, albeit we think its eulogy rather strongly expressed by the Walden-Pondist, when he says, “I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.  I would rather ride on earth in an ox-cart with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion-train, and breathe a malaria all the way.”  The only objection to out-door slumber is dampness; but it is easy to protect one’s self in wet weather from the unhealthy ground by boughs or India-rubber blankets.

One of the great precautions requisite for a tramp is to provide against thirst.  Want of water overtakes the traveller sometimes in the most annoying manner, and it is well to know how to fight off the dry fiend.  Sir James Alexander cautions all who rough it to drink well before starting in the morning, and drink nothing all day till the halt,—­and to keep the lips shut as much as possible.  Another good authority recommends a pebble or leaf to be held in the mouth.  Habit, however, does much in this case as in every other, and we have known a man, who had been accustomed at home to drink at every meal four tumblers of water, by force of will bring his necessity down to a pint of liquid per day, during a long tramp through the forest.  One of the many excellent things which Plutarch tells of Socrates is this noteworthy incident of his power of abstinence.  He says, whenever Socrates returned from any exercise, though he might be extremely dry, he refrained nevertheless from drinking till he had thrown away the first bucket of water he had drawn, that he might exercise himself to patience, and accustom his appetite to wait the leisure of reason.