“In such a Platonic republic as this a man found his place according to his powers.  The cooks were no base scullions; they were brethren, whom conscious ability, sustained by universal suffrage, had endowed with the frying-pan.”

“My hosts were a stalwart gang....  Their talk was as muscular as their arms.  When these laughed, as only men fresh and hearty and in the open air can laugh, the world became mainly grotesque:  it seemed at once a comic thing to live,—­a subject for chuckling, that we were bipeds, with noses,—­a thing to roar at, that we had all met there from the wide world, to hobnob by a frolicsome fire with tin pots of coffee, and partake of crisped bacon and toasted dough-boys in ridiculous abundance.  Easy laughter infected the atmosphere.  Echoes ceased to be pensive, and became jocose.  A rattling humor pervaded the forest, and Green River rippled with noise of fantastic jollity.  Civilization and its dilettante diners-out sneer when Clodpole at Dives’s table doubles his soup, knifes his fish, tilts his plate into his lap, puts muscle into the crushing of his meringue, and tosses off the warm beaker in his finger-bowl.  Camps by Tacoma sneer not at all, but candidly roar, at parallel accidents.  Gawky makes a cushion of his flapjack.  Butterfingers drops his red-hot rasher into his bosom, or lets slip his mug of coffee into his boot drying at the fire,—­a boot henceforth saccharine.  A mule, slipping his halter, steps forward unnoticed, puts his nose into the circle, and brays resonant.  These are the jocular boons of life, and at these the woodsmen guffaw with lusty good-nature.  Coarse and rude the jokes may be, but not nasty, like the innuendoes of pseudo-refined cockneys.  If the woodsmen are guilty of uncleanly wit, it differs from the uncleanly wit of cities as the mud of a road differs from the sticky slime of slums.

“It is a stout sensation to meet masculine, muscular men at the brave point of a penetrating Boston hooihut,—­men who are mates,—­men to whom technical culture means nought,—­men to whom myself am nought, unless I can saddle, lasso, cook, sing, and chop,—­unless I am a man of nerve and pluck, and a brother in generosity and heartiness.  It is restoration to play at cudgels of jocoseness with a circle of friendly roughs, not one of whom ever heard the word bore,—­with pioneers, who must think and act, and wrench their living from the closed hand of Nature.”

And here is a dinner “in the open.”

“Upon the carte du jour at Restaurant Sowee was written Grouse.  ’How shall we have them?’ said I, cook and convive, to Loolowcan, marmiton and convive.  ’One of these cocks of the mountain shall be fried, since gridiron is not,’ responded I to myself, after meditation; ’two shall be spitted and roasted; and, as Azrael may not want us before breakfast to-morrow, the fourth shall go upon the carte de dejeuner’.

“‘O Pork! what a creature thou art!’ continued I, in monologue, cutting neat slices of that viand with my bowie-knife, and laying them fraternally, three in a bed, in the frying-pan.  ’Blessed be Moses, who forbade thee to the Jews, whereby we, of freer dispensations, heirs of all the ages, inherit also pigs more numerous and bacon cheaper!  O Pork! what could campaigners do without thy fatness, thy leanness, thy saltness, thy portableness?’