Excerpt from Camp-Fire Musings: Life and Good Times in the Woods Mankind has never willingly relinquished the camp fire. It is not preference, but necessity, that has driven him indoors. Even there he Carried and rekindled its embers, and it became the hearth-fire: a flame, sister to the flame of love. So much he res cued from the wreck of Paradise. It is not till the overcrowding of his own kind has exterminated the game, and ravaged the forests with steel and fire; and not till the increase of competing herds has exhausted the pastures, that man will fence in for himself a patch of the wilderness, domesticate for himself a few of its birds_and quadrupeds, and build for himself a castle. Civilization is to him a choice of evils, and he has never forgotten nor ceased to long for Paradise. It is not for civilization to vaunt itself over barbarism. Let us first produce a better moralist and legislator than the Shepherd of Midian, a better bard than he of Chios, a sweeter singer than the shepherd boy of Bethlehem, seers more sublime than they who saw and followed the Star, better soldiers than the forest ers who crushed imperial Rome. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.