Near camp stood a tall, ragged yellow birch, its partially cast-off bark hanging in crisp sheets or dense rolls.

“That tree needs the barber,” we said, “and shall have a call from him to-night.”

So after dark I touched a match into it, and we saw the flames creep up and wax in fury until the whole tree and its main branches stood wrapped in a sheet of roaring flame.  It was a wild and striking spectacle, and must have advertised our camp to every nocturnal creature in the forest.

What does the camper think about when lounging around the fire at night?  Not much,—­of the sport of the day, of the big fish he lost and might have saved, of the distant settlement, of to-morrow’s plans.  An owl hoots off in the mountain and he thinks of him; if a wolf were to howl or a panther to scream, he would think of him the rest of the night.  As it is, things flicker and hover through his mind, and he hardly knows whether it is the past or the present that possesses him.  Certain it is, he feels the hush and solitude of the great forest, and, whether he will or not, all his musings are in some way cast upon that huge background of the night.  Unless he is an old camper-out, there will be an undercurrent of dread or half fear.  My companion said he could not help but feel all the time that there ought to be a sentinel out there pacing up and down.  One seems to require less sleep in the woods, as if the ground and the untempered air rested and refreshed him sooner.  The balsam and the hemlock heal his aches very quickly.  If one is awakened often during the night, as he invariably is, he does not feel that sediment of sleep in his mind next day that he does when the same interruption occurs at home; the boughs have drawn it all out of him.

And it is wonderful how rarely any of the housed and tender white man’s colds or influenzas come through these open doors and windows of the woods.  It is our partial isolation from Nature that is dangerous; throw yourself unreservedly upon her and she rarely betrays you.

If one takes anything to the woods to read, he seldom reads it; it does not taste good with such primitive air.

There are very few camp poems that I know of, poems that would be at home with one on such an expedition; there is plenty that is weird and spectral, as in Poe, but little that is woody and wild as this scene is.  I recall a Canadian poem by the late C.D.  Shanly—­the only one, I believe, the author ever wrote—­that fits well the distended pupil of the mind’s eye about the camp-fire at night.  It was printed many years ago in the “Atlantic Monthly,” and is called “The Walker of the Snow;” it begins thus:—­

“’Speed on, speed on, good master;
The camp lies far away;
We must cross the haunted valley
Before the close of day.’”

“That has a Canadian sound,” said Aaron; “give us more of it.”

“’How the snow-blight came upon me
I will tell you as we go,—­
The blight of the shadow hunter
Who walks the midnight snow.’”