“Barefoot through the Elysian fields!” she said.

II

I am not trying to defend myself.  I never had the enthusiasm of the other two, but I rather liked the idea.  And I did restrain them.  It was my suggestion, for instance, that we wear sandals without stockings, instead of going in our bare feet, which was a good thing, for the first day out Aggie stepped into a hornet’s nest.  And I made out the lists.

The idea, of course, is not how much one can carry, but how little.  The “Young Woodsman” told exactly how to manage in the woods if one were lost there and had nothing in the world but a bootlace and a wire hairpin.

With the hairpin one could easily make a fair fish-hook—­and with a bootlace or a good hemp cord one could make a rabbit snare.

“So you see,” Tish explained, “there’s fish and meat with no trouble at all.  And there will be berries and nuts.  That’s a diet for a king.”

I was making a list of the necessaries at the time and under bootlaces and hairpins I put down “spade.”

“What in Heaven’s name is the spade for?” Tish demanded.

“You’ve got to dig bait, haven’t you?”

Tish eyed me with disgust.

“Grasshoppers!” she said tersely.

There was really nothing Tish was not prepared for.  I should never have thought of grasshoppers.

“The idea is simply this,” observed Tish:  “We have surrounded ourselves with a thousand and one things we do not need and would be better without—­houses, foolish clothing, electric light, idiotic servants—­Hannah, get away from that door!—­rich foods, furniture and crowds of people.  We’ve developed and cared for our bodies instead of our souls.  What we want is to get out into the woods and think; to forget those pampered bodies of ours and to let our souls grow and assert themselves.”

We decided finally to take a blanket apiece, rolled on our shoulders, and Tish and I each took a strong knife.  Aggie, instead of the knife, took a pair of scissors.  We took a small bottle of blackberry cordial for emergencies, a cake of soap, a salt-cellar for seasoning the fish and rabbits, two towels, a package of court-plaster, Aggie’s hay-fever remedy, a bottle of oil of pennyroyal to use against mosquitoes, and a large piece of canvas, light but strong, cut like the diagram.

[Illustration]

Tish said it was the regulation Indian tepee, and that a squaw could set one up in an hour and have dinner cooked inside it in thirty minutes after.  She said she guessed we could do it if an Indian squaw could, and that after we’d cut the poles once, we could carry them with us if we wished to move.  She said the tent ought to be ornamented, but she had had no time, and we could paint designs on it with colored clay in the woods when we had nothing more important to do!

It made a largish bundle, but we did not intend to travel much.  We thought we could find a good place by a lake somewhere and put up the tent, and set a few snares, and locate the nearest berry-bushes and mushroom-patches, and then, while the rabbits were catching themselves, we should have time to get acquainted with our souls again.