Camp Life.

That genial old gossiper, Dr. Henry Van Dyke, has something to say in his book “Fisherman's Luck,” about holiday life in the open that I cannot resist quoting, since it perfectly expresses a fact that we New Zealanders, who love the camp life, can vividly appreciate. “The people who always live in houses,” he writes, “and sleep on beds, and walklon pavements, and buy their food from butchers and bakers and grocers, are not the most blessed inhabitants of this wide and various earth. The circumstances are too mathematical and secure for perfect contentment. They live at second or third hand. They are boarders in the world. Everything is done for them by somebody else…. What do these tame ducks really know of the adventure of living? They might as well be brought up in an incubator. But when man abides in tents, after the manner of the early patriarchs, the face of the world is renewed. The vagaries of the clouds become significant. You watch the sky with a lover's look, eager to know whether it will smile or frown. When you lie at night upon your bed of boughs and hear the rain pattering on the canvas close above your head; you wonder whether it is a storm or only a shower.”

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That sort of experience, now and then, is good for most people. As Van Dyke says, it brings us home to the plain realities of life.