W

HEN I was a little girl I despised the princess in the fairy-tale who could not rest easily on her seven quilts of silk and down because, underneath the last and lowest of them, a rose petal lay crumpled. Now I have compassion for her, for those who recline on sevenfold silk and down spread between themselves and rugged reality never rest at all. If there be no crumpled rose petal, the thought of one suffices to disturb them. Pillowed upon a softness that thwarts or denies reality, we may have witless slumber and illusory dreams, but valid repose is for those who do not fear that which is hard. Our rest is on reality.

Our peace is in reality. This thought I have found growing near the gnarled roots of trees that have sheltered me in the woods at night. I have found it, also, flourishing in chilly sand at the heavy ocean's edge. Whenever and wherever I have slept upon the ground at night I have caught glimpses of it by the light of the first stars. And I have looked at it again in the morning as soon as a new dawn has made it possible to see thoughts growing. I have tried to transplant it into my mind.

Whenever and wherever I have found this thought growing I have found rest. The ground, the underlying reality for our bodies, that from which there is no falling away, is the best of all beds. It is the bed of heroes before they die in battle and find rest in it forever; it is the bed of hermits who keep vigil for the soul's sake; it is the bed of the quaint company of the poets who wander up and down the highways of the world forever, seeking the tunes that will echo longest in the minds of men and the images that men's tears will never wash away. The ground is the bed on which Christ slept in the wilderness. It is the clean refuge of the poor.

Resting on it makes the body firm, the mind joyful.

To find this firmness and joy, to achieve this rest upon reality, nobody needs to endure more than all manhood and womanhood should be able to endure. It is not necessary to be uncomfortable night after night. Times will come when no amount of foresight can prevent a certain amount of discomfort. But such humorous hardness should symbolize for us that discipline of heart and mind without which we reach no intellectual or spiritual reality. As a rule, after the first two or three nights in the open, aching bones are either a myth or a stupidity.

It seems strange to me now to remember that, whereas my ancestors, for thousands of years, could have had no other bed, I lived for thirty years in a world full of groves and wild skies without ever spending a night on the ground under the stars. Then it came to pass, at last, that my husband and I set out on our first adventure, the seven weeks' cruise down the Willamette River in the boat which we built ourselves and christened The Dingbat of Arcady. Our first night on the ground was spent near Albany, Oregon, in a forest of maples.

After a hot supper cooked by the water's edge we made our boat fast to a sapling and then, carrying our blankets and two long strips of heavy canvas, we entered the grove. We found a superb maple with a stretch of level earth under it about eight feet square on one side, and sloping away from the roots. It was summer and the branches above were in full leaf. I leaned against the trunk and watched while Jim loosened the earth in the open space with a hatchet and made a slight hollow (as travellers do in the Western desert) for the hips to rest in. This is an essential of comfort. The spine grows weary when held at an angle all night by a flat surface.

When the earth was arranged, which took not more than five minutes, we spread out the canvas and laid woollen blankets on it. As much depends on blankets underneath as on blankets on top when sleeping on the ground. Then came light cotton blankets-the "sleepbetween" which could be washed easily and served as protection against the dust that always gathers in wool. On top of this we put more woollen blankets. We kept the second strip of canvas at hand for protection if it should rain. We had

no tent.

No roof stood between us and heaven -none but the broad, deeply cleft leaves of our tree. On one side even these did not hide the sky. On that side there was not even a mist to mask the street-lamps of the eternal cities above us as a light fog from the harbor sometimes veils the stars that are New York at night. Climbing through that aperture in the branches on rays of starlight, my vision rose into the everlasting blue and my spirit followed.

No walls were between us and the voice of the river to deaden the long sound of its chanting-none but the walls of quiet air through which that chanting came. My lips moved with the desire to shape words to the tune of it and I gathered vague syllables together into heaps in my mind as I listened, only to throw them all away again at last. It had to be a song without words.

There was nothing between us and the nervous life that plays sensuously upon the surface of the earth. The ground whispered when an insect moved in it or over it. The hush of night was broken, occasionally, by the passing of the little night-hunters of the wood, scurrying across leaves and twigs to and from their hidden homes, talking with their quick feet. Sometimes something fell. Then silence closed in again deeper than before. The air near my face was moist and full of sober fragrances. I wanted to stay awake all night and get the uttermost joy out of the experience. But even as I resolved to keep watch over the world with the stars I lost them. . .

In the woods, although I wake earlier than when I am at home, I usually wake more beautifully and gradually. If the

wood be thick, or the day cloudy, my first awareness of waking is the half-conscious answer of the mind to the calling of birds near at hand that seem, in my dreamy state, to be very far away. At first I lie quiet with no desire to move a finger, opening my eyes for an instant from time to time to see the robust trunks of trees define themselves and emerge from vanishing mist or kindly shadow. Then I realize that the tip of my nose is cold. I lift a hand to my hair and find that it is heavy with dew. I turn stiffly. I listen consciously to the bird song. One by one more trees add themselves to the number of those that I can see. A shaft of keen light falls through arching branches upon the floor of the grove. The grass becomes visible, stiff and spangled. If there be flowers near my bed I notice them. Then it is time to get up.

On the first morning of our trip the waking and rising happened in this way. I walked slowly down to the river, getting used to my legs almost as if I were learning to walk. The stream was smooth from bank to bank as if the ripples still slept. It steamed with light, white mist. An evanescent foam or scum clung to the small reeds near the bank, and in quiet places bubbles floated. A fish jumped. The sun stared at me ruddy and imperturbable from his low house in the East. I saluted him. Then I plunged in for my morning swim. My mood that had moved to an expectant andante now quickened to a happy allegro. I gathered some pieces of dry wood barkless and bleached, like the bones of a tree, and made a fire and cooked breakfast. The day had begun.

On the next night of the trip and on several succeeding nights, although there was as much beauty to be enjoyed, there was more hardship, for it rained. On our second night out we camped with the maples again, but in another grove, farther down the river. When we had been asleep only a little while we were awakened by a noise strange to us, the shy, slow, perturbed fluttering of the top branches of the trees shifting in an intermittent breeze, and the first gentle pattering of rain upon their leaves. The thought of a shower roused us, for, as I

It was only a strip of shelving pebbly beach that we saw, with a clump of birches white in a dazzle of sun and flutter of air. But a virginal freshness of atmosphere made the place delightful to us who had struggled long with the rain in thick dark groves. In all directions we saw wild, untouched country. No sign of man! What a place for a rest and a frolic! It was very hot. Jim decided to stay for a couple of hours and row on down-stream later in the day when it would be cooler. We stopped, put on our bathing-suits, and walked into the river. We had a delightful afternoon. I sat down joyfully in the current where the water was on a level with my shoulders, and ducked my head under from time to time to let it have the fun of tugging at my hair. We washed the blankets and hung them on bushes to dry. Then I gave myself up to delight in the weather. I was wild with golden sun and blue water and white solitude. One swim was not enough for me. All afternoon I ran in and out of the river. Jim washed the boat and then rested quietly. It was not until about five o'clock that we packed our clean, dry things into a clean, dry Dingbat, and pulled reluctantly out of the port of Arcady to finish the day's cruise. We had to travel until about eight o'clock to make up for our afternoon of leisure. We did not know then that it would have been wiser to remain where we were.

But soon after we had left Arcady behind us I felt a strange, drowsy pain waking in my feet. At first I paid no attention. The pain persisted and grew worse. A sudden twinge when I moved one foot eventually challenged attention. I looked at my feet and saw that something quite unprecedented was happening. They were rosy purple, and in form resembled the chubby feet of Michelangelo's cherubs. I tried to stand and discovered that it had become an agony merely to bend them at the ankles. I sat down in limp distress. It was an exceedingly bad case of sunburn, the result of my intemperate revelling in sun and water.

It was evident that we could not camp for the night anywhere where walking would be necessary, and that we had better stop at the first flat beach. When we found a suitable place my feet had

swollen to about twice their normal size and were aching furiously. Jim lifted me out of the boat and set me down on the shore like a pathetic bundle. We had no curative lotion with us, nothing that could be used but a little lard left over from cooking. Jim made a bed on the beach and put me into it with my melancholy feet uplifted on a typewriter and a suitcase. It was only toward morning that the pain eased somewhat and permitted two or three hours of slumber.

Even so I was awakened early by a shadow directly over my face and I looked up into the countenance, humorous and pointed, the two beady eyes and sharp snout of a friendly little pig. To show him that I was not good to eat and did not intend to be eaten, I said, "Hello!" Whereupon he replied with an exquisitely modulated "Oi, oi, oi," that made me think of the Greek syllable without the rough breathing. After this polite salutation he trotted away. For me, however, he was symbolic. Never since then have I let intemperate pleasure lead to sunburned feet. So Apollo taught me, as he taught the Greeks of old, that there is temperance even in beauty.

By the time my feet were well again we had stopped all of the leaks in The Dingbat with pitch and oakum, and we sometimes found it convenient to sleep on the floor of her while she rocked quietly all night on the lonely waters of that little river. When evening came we would tie her securely by her long rope to some sapling on shore and then let her float inside of a log boom, or in some shallow cove. At first, when we slept in her in this way, we covered the floor with branches of the firs, laying our blankets on top of them. It was a fairly good bed, though less comfortable than the ground in the forests. Then, one day, we met a farmer, who told us that there might be wood-ticks in the fir branches and offered us hay instead. We took big armfuls of it from his little red barn and offered to pay for it, but the farmer would accept nothing. It was only hay, he said! We spread it out where the fir branches had been and rested fragrantly on it while our boat was tipping and slipping about gently on water that lapped softly against the fourteen-inch planks that were her