As to the question of expense, there is no need to say much. All over our sparsely-inhabited land places wild enough are within easy reach, and the journey to reach them need not be long. Beyond this, tent-life is, of course, less costly than the hotel or boarding-house, in which such numbers of people swelter through their summers. As to food, it is often needful to be within reach of farm-houses or hotels, and all kind of modifications of the life I advise are possible.
As to inconveniences, they are, of course, many, but, with a little ingenuity, it is easy to make tent-life comfortable, and none need dread them. Any book on camp-life will tell how to meet or avoid them, and to such treatises I beg to refer the reader who wishes to experiment on this delightful mode of gypsying.
The class of persons who find it easy to reach the most charming sites and to secure the help of competent guides is, as I have said in another place, increasing rapidly. The desire also for such a life is also healthfully growing, so that this peculiarly American mode of getting an outing is becoming more and more familiar. It leads to our young folks indulging in all sorts of strengthening pursuits. It takes them away from less profitable places, and the good it does need not be confined to the boys. Young women may swim, fish, and row like their brothers, but the life has gains and possibilities, as to which I would like to say something more. In a well-ordered camp you may be sure of good food and fair cooking. To sleep and live in the air is an insurance against what we call taking cold. Where nature makes the atmospheric changes, they are always more gradual and kindly than those we make at any season when we go from street to house or house to street.
My brothers during the war always got colds when at home on leave, and those who sleep in a chinky cabin or tent soon find that they do not suffer and that they have an increasing desire for air and openness.
To live out of doors seems to be a little matter in the way of change, and that it should have remarkable moral and intellectual values does not appear credible to such as have not had this experience.
Yet, in fact, nothing so dismisses the host of little nervousnesses with which house-caged women suffer as this free life. Cares, frets, worries, and social annoyances disappear, and in the woods and by the waters we lose, as if they were charmed away, our dislikes or jealousies, all the base, little results of the struggle for bread or place. At home, in cities, they seem so large; here, in the gentle company of constant sky and lake and stream, they seem trivial, and we cast them away as easily as we throw aside some piece of worn-out and useless raiment.