For eight weeks this past summer my family of two members camped with two servants. In addition we had the occasional services of a man who did all the heavy work. There was not enough for the servants to do in the cottage and log cabin of our establishment. They were discontented, faultfinding, and wholly out of the spirit of camp life. All of the day that their tone of voice reached was helplessly ruined. The only way to keep the camp joy and pleasure was to keep out of their way. On our camp table we had silver, embroidered linen cloths, the same food, in almost the same variety, that we had it at home, and the same amount of service. All I can say is that it was a perfect nuisance--as perfectly planned and executed a nuisance as one could well conceive. Everywhere these servants looked they found things which did not suit them. What I think they wished was a modest twenty-thousand-dollar cottage in that great and wonderful wilderness.
In the autumn I camped alone for two weeks in a log cabin. I say alone. I was not alone, for I had three friends with me--a collie puppy, a blind fawn, and a year-old cat. They were the best of companions--for better I could not have asked. I never heard a word of faultfinding, and I was witness to a great deal of joy. It is a curious fact about camp life that if a girl has weak places in her character, if she is selfish or peevish or faultfinding or untidy, these weaknesses will all come out. But my four-footed friends were good nature itself, young, growing, happy, contented. And they had excellent appetites. I tell you this because I want you to see how much of an item their food was in the expenses I shall enumerate. This might be called a little intimate history of at least one camp pocketbook. The fawn had a quart of milk a day and much lettuce, together with the kind of food which deer live upon: leaves, grass, clover, ferns. I had to pay for her bedding of hay. The puppy and the cat shared another quart of milk between them. The cat hunted by night, but the puppy was fed entirely by hand on bread, milk, an occasional egg, cereals, and vegetables. My own fare consisted of all the bread and butter I wished, cocoa, condensed milk, bananas, apples, eggs, potatoes, beans, nuts, raisins, cauliflower, chocolate, and a few other articles. And there was, too, the denatured alcohol to be paid for--a heavy item, for I used only a chafing dish and a small spirit lamp. The milk was eight cents a quart on account of the carriage, the butter was thirty-eight cents a pound, the eggs twenty-five cents a dozen. Except for cutting up and splitting the wood for my open Franklin stove, the wood cost me nothing. But I paid a man a dollar for half a day’s work. We weren’t seven, but we were four in that camp community. How much do you think the food for all averaged per week in those two weeks? Three dollars a week, and we had all that we wanted and more, too.