Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 November 1884 — Camping Out. [ARTICLE]

Camping Out.

The typical camp is pretty familiar to the general reader. It consists mainly of a tent, a couple of blankets, a ho e in the ground and a dog. The tent is used to swelter in until it rains, and then it is the best place on the premises for anybody who wants to get wet. The blankets are intended for slumbering purposes; but after the first right they are generally required to kee£ the rain out of the meal and the bugs out of the sugar. The hole in the ground is the kitchen. The cooking is done there. The cooking is a good deal like the hole. No particular use has been discovered for the dog. But he is always there. He makes himself useful, mainly, in eating up the lard and tipping over the milk-pail. These are the only refreshments that he has. His favorite occupation in the night is to sit close by the tent-door, with his mouth open, and keep the moon off. - ■' We forgot to mention the campers. These are usually male and female—either or 1)011). They wear blue flannel day and night, and have sunburned noses. They are generally better fed than the dogs, and not quite so lean. They live on whatever the cook gets up for them. Sometimes he only gets up early in file morning. Then the campers are very indignant because he did not let them know that the provisions were out.

The best fun is boating without fishing, and bathing. Most campers’boats furnish bathing and boating facilities at the same time. This is very convenient for those who are too lazy to undress. Most campers are desperately lazy. Then'food has something to do with it. Where-there are males and females, the bathing has to be done in bathing-suits. This is very amusing, because you can never tell whether a camper is going a-bathing or going out under the trees to write poetry. The bathing suit and the camping suit are just alike. As a rule, nobody ever falls in love while out camping. This is what makes mixed parties so safe. It looks awful dangerous in theory, but when it comes to practice, there isn’t anything dan-gerous-about it. A creature who isperfectly lovely in a ball dress can’t smite worth a cent in a blue flannel blouse, with a man’s big straw hat tied down over her ears and the skin peeling off the end of her nose. Camps are great places to cure love, too. If the young man who goes away to a foreign land With a broken heart, trying to forget her—trying in vain, while his heart-strings ache and his appetite. dwindles down to a fine point—if this poor love-sick young man could only camp out for a week with his idol, he would come home with an enormous hankering for roast beef and a big comfortable patch of contentment on his broken heart. Lots of married people have come mighty near curing their love in camp. It’s a risky experiment and all true lovers will be advised to fight shy of it.— Puck.-