secret between himself and his Maker.  He was one of the best and kindest hearted men that ever graced a humble sphere of life.  He was gentleness and simplicity itself—­and unselfishness, too.  Although he was more than twice as old as the eldest of us, he never gave himself any airs, privileges, or exemptions on that account.  He did a young man’s share of the work; and did his share of conversing and entertaining from the general stand-point of any age—­not from the arrogant, overawing summit-height of sixty years.  His one striking peculiarity was his Partingtonian fashion of loving and using big words for their own sakes, and independent of any bearing they might have upon the thought he was purposing to convey.  He always let his ponderous syllables fall with an easy unconsciousness that left them wholly without offensiveness.  In truth his air was so natural and so simple that one was always catching himself accepting his stately sentences as meaning something, when they really meant nothing in the world.  If a word was long and grand and resonant, that was sufficient to win the old man’s love, and he would drop that word into the most out-of-the-way place in a sentence or a subject, and be as pleased with it as if it were perfectly luminous with meaning.

We four always spread our common stock of blankets together on the frozen ground, and slept side by side; and finding that our foolish, long-legged hound pup had a deal of animal heat in him, Oliphant got to admitting him to the bed, between himself and Mr. Ballou, hugging the dog’s warm back to his breast and finding great comfort in it.  But in the night the pup would get stretchy and brace his feet against the old man’s back and shove, grunting complacently the while; and now and then, being warm and snug, grateful and happy, he would paw the old man’s back simply in excess of comfort; and at yet other times he would dream of the chase and in his sleep tug at the old man’s back hair and bark in his ear.  The old gentleman complained mildly about these familiarities, at last, and when he got through with his statement he said that such a dog as that was not a proper animal to admit to bed with tired men, because he was “so meretricious in his movements and so organic in his emotions.”  We turned the dog out.

It was a hard, wearing, toilsome journey, but it had its bright side; for after each day was done and our wolfish hunger appeased with a hot supper of fried bacon, bread, molasses and black coffee, the pipe-smoking, song-singing and yarn-spinning around the evening camp-fire in the still solitudes of the desert was a happy, care-free sort of recreation that seemed the very summit and culmination of earthly luxury.

It is a kind of life that has a potent charm for all men, whether city or country-bred.  We are descended from desert-lounging Arabs, and countless ages of growth toward perfect civilization have failed to root out of us the nomadic instinct.  We all confess to a gratified thrill at the thought of “camping out.”