From water to fire is a natural transition.  How to get a blaze just when you want it puzzles the will sometimes hugely.  Every traveller should provide himself with a good handy steel, proper flint, and unfailing tinder, because lucifers are liable to many accidents.  Pliny recommended the wood of mulberry, bay-laurel, and ivy, as good material to be rubbed together in order to procure a fire; but Pliny is behind the times, and must not be trusted to make rules for General McLellan’s boys.  Of course no one would omit to take lucifers on a tramp; but steel, flint, and tinder are three warm friends that in an emergency will always come up to the strike.  To find firewood is a knack, and it ought to be well cultivated.  Don’t despise bits of dry moss, fine grass, and slips of bark, if you come across them.  Twenty fires are failures in the open air for one that succeeds, unless the operator knows his business.  A novice will use matches, wood, wind, time, and violent language enough to burn down a city, and never get any satisfaction out of all the expenditure; while a knowing hand will, out of the stump of an old, half-rotten tree, bring you such magnificent, permanent heat, that your heart and your tea-kettle will sing together for joy over it.  In making a fire, depend upon it, there is something more than luck,—­there is always talent in it.  We once saw Charles Lever (Harry Lorrequer’s father) build up a towering blaze in a woody nook out of just nothing but what he scraped up from the ground, and his rare ability.  You remember Mr. Opie the painter’s answer to a student who asked him what he mixed his colors with.  “Brains, Sir,” was the artist’s prompt, gruff, and right reply.  It takes brains to make a fire in a rainy night out in the woods; but it can be done,—­if you only know how to begin.  We have seen a hearth made of logs on a deep snow sending out a cheerful glow, while the rain dripped and froze all about the merry party assembled.

A traveller ought to be a good swimmer.  There are plenty of watery crossings to be got over, and often there are no means at hand but what Nature has provided in legs and arms.  But one of the easiest things in the world to make is a raft.  Inflatable India-rubber boats also are now used in every climate, and a full-sized one weighs only forty pounds.  General Fremont and Dr. Livingstone have tested their excellent qualities, and commend them as capable of standing a wonderful amount of wear and tear.  But a boat can be made out of almost anything, if one have the skill to put it together.  A party of sailors whose boat had been stolen put out to sea and were eighteen hours afloat in a crazy craft made out of a large basket woven with boughs such as they could pick up, and covered with their canvas tent, the inside being plastered with clay to keep out as much of the water as possible.

In fording streams, it is well, if the water be deep and swift, to carry heavy stones in the hands, in order to resist being borne away by the current.  Fords should not be deeper than three feet for men, or four feet for horses.