Lay in a supply of candles, and two or three common stable lanterns. You may add to these items as many luxuries as your baggage will supply room for, or your purse or taste dictate. Fruit syrups, such as are used at reputable soda-water fountains, make very pleasant and healthful drinks when combined with good, cold spring-water. Lemons will keep in a cool, dry place for two weeks, and as a garnish for fish or soup not only give an appetizing look, which, as a rule, is unnecessary in camp food, but they add to the taste and relish, which is a property that persons blessed with good appetites appreciate, even when on a camping expedition.
It was in the golden age of whittling that wooden bugles and the Wabash horns were in their prime.
It is hardly an exaggerated figure of speech to say that the United States, with all its power and wealth, has been whittled out of the raw material by our ancestors, with their Barlow knives.
I think I have already told the readers, in one of my other books, that the practice of
was not formerly confined to the youth of the country; lawyers, merchants, and statesmen, were adepts in the art, and on the counter of every well-regulated tavern was always to be found a heap of sweet-smelling cedar sticks for the guests to whittle, after meals.
Even as early as Puritan times the jack-knives were busy, and the little conscience-stricken Nathaniel Mathers confesses that “of the manifold sins which then I was guilty of none so sticks upon me as that, being very young, I was _whittling on the Sabbath day_, and for fear of being seen I did it behind the door.”
Times have changed since this poor little chap hid behind the door to whittle a stick, and some of the less conscientious descendants of the Puritans would not dare now to whittle on Sunday, or any other day, for fear of cutting their clumsy, untrained fingers. But the fingers of the readers of this book, I trust, are skilful in the use of a pocket-knife, and for them it will not be a difficult task to make a Wabash, or Flat-boatman’s, wooden horn.
The wooden horn was the particular favorite of the jolly, reckless flat-boatmen. Its soft musical notes sounded especially sweet and mellow in the early morning, when the boatmen were casting loose their cables from their moorings. From Pittsburg to New Orleans the reveille of the boatmen’s horns announced the dawn of another day.