Success is an excellent testimonial, and there is no longer any need to point out the advantages of such camps for boys and girls.  They fill a real place for the delicate, the lazy, or the backward, who must needs do extra work to keep up with their school grade, for those who otherwise would be condemned to hotel life, or for the children whose parents, because of circumstances, are compelled to spend the summer in cities.  Even the most jealously anxious of mothers are among the converts to the movement.  As one said the other day of her only son, “Yes, David will go to Mr. D.’s camp again this summer.  It will be his third year.  I thought the first time that I simply could not part with him.  I pictured him drowned or ill from poor food or severe colds.  Indeed, there wasn’t a single terror I didn’t imagine.  But he enjoyed it so, and came home so well and happy, that I’ve never worried since.”

From the child’s point of view, summer camps are a blessing, and, as such, they have come to stay.  But there are those who doubt their benefits, even the financial ones, for the teachers, who mortgage their vacations to conduct them.  Unfortunately, as every one knows, almost every teacher has to mortgage her spare time in one way or another in order to make a more than bare living.  Call the roll of those whom you may know, and you will be surprised—­no, scarcely surprised; merely interested—­to find that nine-tenths of them do some additional work.  It may be extra tutoring, hack writing, translating, the editing of school texts or the writing of text-books, taking agencies for this, that, or the other commodity, conducting travel parties, lecturing at educational institutes, running women’s clubs, or organizing nature classes.  Some outside vocation is necessary if the teacher is to enjoy the advantages her training makes almost imperative, or the comforts her tired, nervous organism demands.  So, as one philosopher was heard to remark, it is perhaps best to run a summer camp, since in the doing of it there is at least the advantage of being in the open and of leading a wholesomely sane existence.

Two good friends and fellow-teachers who have conducted a camp in northern Maine for the last five years have been extremely frank in setting forth their experiences for the benefit of those who are standing on the brink of a similar venture.  And their story is worth while, because from every point of view they have been successful.  Any pessimistic touches in their narrative cannot be laid at the door of failure.  Indeed, in their first year they cleared expenses, and that is rare; and their clientele has steadily increased until now they have a camp of forty or more girls, at the very topmost of camp prices.  Again, as there were two of them and they are both versatile, they have needed little assistance; the mother of one has been house mother and general camp counsellor.  With all this as optimistic preamble, let us hear their story.