"But for my gramniverous steeds, gallopers all day long, unflinching steeplechase, what had nature done here in the way of provender? Alas! little or naught. This camp of plenty for me was a starvation camp for them.
"My hosts were a stalwart gang. I had truly divined them from their cleavings on the hooihut (road). It was but play for any one of these to whittle down a cedar five feet in diameter. In the morning this compact knot of comrades would explode into a mitraille of men wielding keen axes, and down would go the dumb, stolid files of the forest. 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 doughboys in ridiculous abundance. Easy laughter infected the atmosphere. Echoes ceased to be pensive and became jocose. A rattling humor pervaded the feast, and Green River[14] rippled with noise of fantastic jollity. Civilization and its dilettante diners-out sneer when Clodpole at Dive'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. Gawkey 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 by the fire—a boot henceforth saccharine. A mule, slipping his halter, steps forward unnoticed, puts his nose in 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 naught—men to whom myself am naught, 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.