We found the small skiff belonging to the Brigade boys, and without loss of time set out across a deep bend of the lake toward the landmarks that signified the locality of the camp.  I got Johnny to row—­not because I mind exertion myself, but because it makes me sick to ride backwards when I am at work.  But I steered.  A three-mile pull brought us to the camp just as the night fell, and we stepped ashore very tired and wolfishly hungry.  In a “cache” among the rocks we found the provisions and the cooking utensils, and then, all fatigued as I was, I sat down on a boulder and superintended while Johnny gathered wood and cooked supper.  Many a man who had gone through what I had, would have wanted to rest.

It was a delicious supper—­hot bread, fried bacon, and black coffee.  It was a delicious solitude we were in, too.  Three miles away was a saw-mill and some workmen, but there were not fifteen other human beings throughout the wide circumference of the lake.  As the darkness closed down and the stars came out and spangled the great mirror with jewels, we smoked meditatively in the solemn hush and forgot our troubles and our pains.  In due time we spread our blankets in the warm sand between two large boulders and soon feel asleep, careless of the procession of ants that passed in through rents in our clothing and explored our persons.  Nothing could disturb the sleep that fettered us, for it had been fairly earned, and if our consciences had any sins on them they had to adjourn court for that night, any way.  The wind rose just as we were losing consciousness, and we were lulled to sleep by the beating of the surf upon the shore.

It is always very cold on that lake shore in the night, but we had plenty of blankets and were warm enough.  We never moved a muscle all night, but waked at early dawn in the original positions, and got up at once, thoroughly refreshed, free from soreness, and brim full of friskiness.  There is no end of wholesome medicine in such an experience.  That morning we could have whipped ten such people as we were the day before —­sick ones at any rate.  But the world is slow, and people will go to “water cures” and “movement cures” and to foreign lands for health.  Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would restore an Egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor, and give him an appetite like an alligator.  I do not mean the oldest and driest mummies, of course, but the fresher ones.  The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious.  And why shouldn’t it be?—­it is the same the angels breathe.  I think that hardly any amount of fatigue can be gathered together that a man cannot sleep off in one night on the sand by its side.  Not under a roof, but under the sky; it seldom or never rains there in the summer time.  I know a man who went there to die.  But he made a failure of it.  He was a skeleton when he came, and could barely stand.  He had no appetite, and did nothing but read tracts and reflect on the future.  Three months later he was sleeping out of doors regularly, eating all he could hold, three times a day, and chasing game over mountains three thousand feet high for recreation.  And he was a skeleton no longer, but weighed part of a ton.  This is no fancy sketch, but the truth.  His disease was consumption.  I confidently commend his experience to other skeletons.