“The north wood does not offer welcome or respond readily to the lover of conventional luxury and the smaller comforts of living. Luxury is there, surely, but it is the luxury that rewards effort, and privation, and toil. It is the comfort of food and warmth and dry clothes after a day of endurance–a day of wet, and dragging weariness and bitter chill. It is the bliss of reaching, after long, toilsome travel, a place where you can meet the trout–the splendid, full-grown wild trout, in his native home, knowing that you will not find a picnic party on every brook and a fisherman behind every tree. Finally, it is the preciousness of isolation, the remoteness from men who dig up and tear down and destroy, who set whistles to tooting and bells to jingling–who shriek themselves hoarse in the market place and make the world ugly and discordant, and life a short and fevered span in which the soul has a chance to become no more than a feeble and crumpled thing. And if that kind of a soul pleases you, don’t go to the woods. It will be only a place of mosquitoes, and general wetness, and discomfort. You won’t care for it. You will hate it. But if you are willing to get wet and stay wet–to get cold and stay cold–to be bruised , and scuffed, and bitten–to be hungry and thirsty and to have your muscles strained and sore from unusual taxation: if you will welcome all these things, not once, but many times for the sake of moments of pure triumph and that larger luxury which come with the comfort of the camp and the conquest of the wilderness, then go! The wilderness will welcome you, and teach you, and take you to its heart. And you will find your own soul there; the discovery will be worth while!” – The Tent Dwellers, A.B. Paine, 1908