“But, Ned,” said Dick, “I just can’t keep away from the woods, and they do me good, I know they do.  I am a whole lot better every way after a good long tramp by myself through the thickest woods I can find.  I’d like to camp out in them to-night and I believe I will.”

“That’s all right, Dick.  I’ll camp with you; only we’ve got to have Doc’s permission.  He trusts us a lot, and we can’t go back on him.”

“Nice chance we’ve got of getting that.  Maybe he’d camp with us!” said Dick satirically.

“Shouldn’t wonder if he would.  You don’t understand Doc.  Did you ever know him to refuse a fellow anything he squarely asked for, unless he simply had to do it?  Come along.”

And the boys walked together to the study.

“Doctor,” said Ned, “Dick and I want to camp out to-night in Farmer Field’s woods, if you have no objection.”

“Want to camp out?  Well, so do I, only I am afraid I might be needed here.  Do you know how to camp?  What do you expect to take with you and how will you keep warm?”

“We thought of taking a hatchet, a blanket for each of us and some potatoes to roast.  Then we will make a bed of hemlock boughs, build a fire near it and roll up in our blankets.”

“Well, you may go, and I will help out your commissariat with a loaf of bread and a chicken.  But be sure you have plenty of fuel ready before dark.  It will be a cold night and you will have to replenish your fire three or four times before morning.”

“Thank you, Doctor.  You don’t know how much obliged we are to you for your kindness.”

“And you don’t know how much trouble I am in for, when the rest of the boys hear of this escapade of yours.”

But after the study door closed the doctor smiled quietly to himself and said under his breath: 

“Just like myself at their age—­have the woods instinct.”

Ned and Dick slept little that night.  There was about a foot of snow on the ground and they scraped bare a place for their camp-fire beside a big stump and gathered enough fuel from windfalls for the night.  Then they rolled a log beside the fire for a seat and built a soft bed with fragrant branches of hemlock and spruce.  They roasted the chicken over a thick bed of glowing coals and baked potatoes in the ashes of the fire.  The chicken was carved with their pocket knives and they got along without forks or plates.  By using bark gathered from a birch and softening it over their fire they made cups with which they brought water from a nearby brook.  When supper was finished the boys rolled up in their blankets and lying on the bed they had built on the snow, inhaled its fragrance as they watched the eddying smoke of their camp-fire and the stars that shone through the spreading branches above them and listened to the voices of the night, from the distant cry of an owl to the whish of falling snow, shaken from evergreen boughs by the breeze.  They had visions of camps, scattered from the equator to the poles, some of which were destined to be realized.  Ned formed a plan that night, of which he wrote to his father, but of which he said nothing at the time to his chum.