Miscellaneous
(Page 6 of 14)

LADIES AND CHILDREN IN CAMP.

In a permanent camp, however, ladies, and children as well, can make themselves thoroughly at home.[24] They ought not to "rough it" so much as young men expect to: consequently they should be better protected from the wet and cold.

I have seen a man with his wife and two children enjoy themselves through a week of rainy weather in an A-tent; but there are not many such happy families, and it is not advisable to camp with such limited accommodations.

Almost all women will find it trying to their backs to be kept all day in an A-tent. If you have no other kind, you should build some sort of a wall, and pitch the tent on top of it. It is not a difficult or expensive task to put guy-lines and a wall of drilling on an A-tent, and make new poles, or pitch the old ones upon posts. In either case you should stay the tent with lines running from the top to the ground.

It has already been advised that women should have a stove; in general, they ought not to depart so far from home ways as men do.

Rubber boots are almost a necessity for women and children during rainy weather and while the dew is upon the grass.

 

[24] It is no novelty for women and children to camp out: we see them every summer at the seaside and on the blueberry-plains. A great many families besides live in rude cabins, which are preferable on many accounts, but are expensive. Sickness sometimes results, but usually all are much benefited. I know a family that numbered with its guests nine ladies, five children ("one at the breast"), and the paterfamilias, which camped several weeks through some of the best and some of the worst of weather. The whooping-cough broke out the second or third day; shortly after, the tent of the mother and children blew down in the night, and turned them all out into the pelting rain in their night-clothes. Excepting the misery of that night and day, nothing serious came of it; and in the fall all returned home better every way for having spent their summer in camp.