Music Welcome to this newscast. The podcast is designed to help you fall asleep. Find us at snoozecast.com and if you enjoy our show, please share us with a friend. This episode is brought to you by a dim forest path. Tonight, we'll read another excerpt from Woodcraft, published by George Washington Sears, under the pen name Nessmuck. Sears was a writer and adventurer who penned essays on hunting, fishing, and camping for popular journals and magazines. Here is some Nessmick lore. This book we are reading from tonight would craft, as remained generally in print, ever since it was published in 1884. There is a mountain in northern Pennsylvania named after him. Mount Nesmic. And finally, his hand crafted canoe, the Sarra Gamp, was named after the Charles Dickens character, Sarra Gamp. Sarra was a comic fictional character in Charles Dickens novel Martin Chuzzlewitt. She was a high-spirited, cockney-n-er-smid-wife of questionable training. The canoe Sarigam was later acquired by the Smithsonian Institution.

Let's get cozy.

Close your eyes.

Relax your body into the softness of your bed.

Now, take a few deep breaths. Campfires in their importance, the wasteful wrong way they are usually made and the right way to make them. second an importance to a warm, dry camp is the campfire. In point of fact, the warmth, dryness, and healthfulness of a forest camp are mainly dependent on the way the fire is managed and kept up. No asthmatic patient ever regained health by dwelling in a close, damp, tent. I once camped for a week in a wall tent with a Philadelphia party and in cold weather. We had a little sheet ironed fiend called a camp stove. When well fed with bark, knots and chips, it would get red hot and have a nose give out heat enough. By the time we were sound asleep, it would subside, and we would presently awake with chattering teeth to kindle her up again. Take a smoke and a nap, turn in for another nap, to awaken again half-frozen. It was a poor substitute for the open camp and bright fire, an experience of 50 years convinces me that a large percentage of the benefit obtained by invulids from camp life is attributable to the open camp and well-managed campfire. And the ladder is usually handled in a way that is too sad, too wasteful, in short, badly botched. The Guides camp. It happened in the summer of 81 that I was making a canoe trip in the northern wilderness, and as racquet lake is the largest and about the most interesting lake in the north woods, I spent about a week paddling, fishing, etc. I made my headquarters at Edben its woodland, hostelary under the hemlocks, as the hotel was filled with men, women, and crying children, bitten to agony by punkies and mosquitoes. I chose to spread my blanket in a well-made park shanty, which a signboard in black and white said was the guide's camp. And this camp was a very popular institution. Here it was that, every evening, when night had settled down on forest and lake, the guests of the hotel would gather to lounge on the bed of fresh balsam browse, chat, sing, and enjoy

the huge campfire. No woodland hotel will long remain popular that does not keep up a bright

a cherry out of door fire. And the fun of it.