O feast most festal! Iglesias, of course, was the great artist who devised and mainly executed it. As well as he could, he covered his pot and pan from the rain, admitting only enough to season each dish with gravy direct from the skies. As day had ripened, the banquet grew ripe. Then as day declined, we reclined on our triclinium of hemlock and spruce boughs, and made high festival, toasting each other in the uninebriating flow of our beverages. Jollity reigned. Cancut fattened, and visibly broadened. Toward the veriest end of the banquet, we seemed to feel that there had been a slight sameness in its courses. The Bill of Fare, however, proved the freest variety. And at the close we sat and sipped our chocolate with uttermost content. No garçon, cringing, but firm, would here intrude with the unhandsome bill. Nothing to pay is the rarest of pleasures. This dinner we had caught ourselves, we had cooked ourselves, and had eaten for the benefit of ourselves and no other. There was nothing to repent of afterwards in the way of extravagance, and certainly nothing of indigestion. Indigestion in the forest primeval, in the shadow of Katahdin, is impossible.
While we dined, we talked of our to-morrow’s climb of Katahdin. We were hopeful. We disbelieved in obstacles. To-morrow would be fine. We would spring early from our elastic bed and stride topwards. Iglesias nerved himself and me with a history of his ascent some years before, up
