In permanent camp, or if you propose to stay anywhere more than three days, the crumbs from the table and the kitchen refuse should be carefully looked after:  to this end it is well to avoid eating in the tents where you live.  Swarms of flies will be attracted by a very little food.

A spade is better, all things considered, than a shovel, either in permanent camp or on the march.

HOW TO KEEP WARM.

When a cold and wet spell of weather overtakes you, you will inquire, “How can we keep warm?” If you are where wood is very abundant, you can build a big fire ten or fifteen feet from the tent, and the heat will strike through the cloth.  This is the poorest way, and if you have only shelter-tents your case is still more forlorn.  But keep the fire a-going:  you can make green wood burn through a pelting storm, but you must have a quantity of it—­say six or eight large logs on at one time.  You must look out for storms, and have some wood cut beforehand.  If you have a stove with you, a little ingenuity will enable you to set it up inside a tent, and run the funnel through the door.  But, unless your funnel is quite long, you will have to improvise one to carry the smoke away, for the eddies around the tent will make the stove smoke occasionally beyond all endurance.  Since you will need but little fire to keep you warm, you can use a funnel made of boards, barrel-staves, old spout, and the like.  Old tin cans, boot-legs, birch-bark, and stout paper can be made to do service as elbows, with the assistance of turf, grass-ropes, and large leaves.  But I forewarn you there is not much fun, either in rigging your stove and funnel, or in sitting by it and waiting for the storm to blow it down.  Still it is best to be busy.

Another way to keep warm is to dig a trench twelve to eighteen inches wide, and about two feet deep, running from inside to the outside of the tent.  The inside end of the trench should be larger and deeper; here you build your fire.  You cover the trench with flat rocks, and fill up the chinks with stones and turf; boards can be used after you have gone a few feet from the fireplace.  Over the outer end, build some kind of a chimney of stones, boxes, boards, or barrels.  The fireplace should not be near enough to the side of the tent to endanger it; and, the taller the chimney is, the better it will draw if you have made the trench of good width and air-tight.  If you can find a sheet-iron covering for the fireplace, you will be fortunate; for the main difficulty in this heating-arrangement is to give it draught enough without letting out smoke, and this you cannot easily arrange with rocks.  In digging your trench and fireplace, make them so that the rain shall not flood them.

FIREPLACE.