Viewing page 276 of 316

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

surmounted by a Roman head he is the ideal lumberman and woodsman. His good natured chuckle bubbles constantly in the camp. He wears a jaunty black hat with a red cord about it and greenish pantaloons all selected with an instinctive sense of color. Royal Reed, Yeisleys man tall thin and blonde with a faded moustache and what he calls a "cow breakfast" hat; lumberman all his life does not smoke, rather taciturn by nature but by no means sullen has his likings and holds to them a little sobered perhaps by a few more years of experience than the rest. George Caisey my man is younger and more impulsive. He seems to have been loaded up with talk down at Medway which he lets off in irregular explosions, like fire crackers in the brush. What fellows to work and to eat. He and I meet on the common ground of onions. Yesterday he fried some and I dined with the guides in their tent. Little they care whether the tins are bright or the knives and forks free from meat. No dainty scruples diminish the cyclopean rations they are capable of stowing away, washed down with rivers of tea. Pork, pork gravy, potatoes and onions! They go to fortify the sinews on which our comfort here depends and the more of them they can assimilate the better it is for us. We have good and abundant fare. Chuck makes a johnny cake and boils rice with raisins. Pork an occasional duck, plenty of fish, bread fresh baked, and hard bread, potatoes and onions with the appetites of cannibals-what could be finer, but a pang seizes me as I think of my burnt boots, my excellent, my only. They are not badly burned however and I hope to discover some expedient for restoring them