handled saucepans when I go camping.  I take for all boiling purposes, including the making of tea, what is called a camp-kettle.  Most ironmongers of any standing seem to keep it, and those who have it not in stock can show you an illustration of it in their wholesale list.  It is just like the pot in which painters carry their paint, except that it has an ordinary saucepan lid.  You should have a “nest” of these—­that is, three in diminishing sizes going one inside the other.  The big lid then fits on the outer one and the two other lids have to be carried separately.

 [Illustration:  The Five-Foot Sausage]

You hang these camp-kettles over the fire by their bucket handles, from the tripod or other means of getting over the fire.  Sometimes the bough of a tree high out of the reach of the flames will do.  Sometimes a stick or oar thrust into the bank or in a crevice of the wall behind the fire is more convenient than a tripod.  Again, you can do without any hanging at all, making a little fireplace of bricks or stones and standing the saucepans “on the hob.”

It is a simple thing to tie the tops of three sticks together and make a tripod.  Then from the place where they join you dangle a piece of string, pass it through the handle of the kettle and tie it to itself, in a knot that can be adjusted up or down to raise or lower the kettle from the fire.  This knot is our old friend the two half-hitches.  Pass the loose end round the down cord, letting it come back under the up cord, then round again with the same finish, and lo! the up cord makes two half-hitches round the down cord.  You can slip, them up and put them where you like and they will hold, but you have to undo them to take the kettle clean away from the fire.  So we add to our equipment a few pot-hooks or pieces of steel wire shaped like an S. Their use will be obvious.  If we have three of them it is quite easy to keep three kettles going over one fire.  They swing cheek by jowl when they all want the same amount of fire, but each can be raised or lowered an inch or several inches to let them respectively boil, simmer or just keep warm.

These are the cooking utensils.  A biscuit tin would make an oven and Gertrude says she must have an oven.  For my part I would not attempt baking when camping out and I will say no more about ovens, except that all the biscuit tins in the world won’t beat a hole in the ground first filled with blazing sticks and then with the things to be baked and covered with turves till they are done.

I had great difficulty in persuading Gertrude to feed out of tin dishes like those which we use sometimes for making shallow round cakes or setting the toffee in.  They are ever so much better than plates, being deep enough for soup-plates and not easy to upset when you use them on your lap.  Any number of the same size will go into one another and a dozen scarcely take up more room than one.