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Show THEIR OUTING A FAILURE. Every Man in the Party Was Homesick Home-sick at the End of the First Day. (Detroit Free Press.) ""Way along last January," said a Detroit merchant, who had just got back after a week "up north," "I J 4' ' .' planned with three of my friends to put in two weeks in the woods this summer. We were to hunt, fish, play poker, sleep on hemlock boughs and have a real jolly time, and there was hardly a day that I didn't think about the good time in store for me. Well, it seemed as if the time would never come, but we got off at last a few days ago and brought up in a town on Lake Michigan. From thence we got a man to drive us fourteen miles into the woods, and our anticipations were at last to be realized. There was a lake, and there were game, and there were hemlock boughs in plenty. We got a brush shanty built before night, and when darkness came we sat around a cheerful fire and patted each other on the back. Not for long, though. Pretty soon one fellow's face began to lengthen, length-en, and he looked up and said: " 'Boys, I'd give half my life for a cocktail, and why I was ass enough to make this trip will always be a mys-. tery to me. "We started a laugh," -continued the merchant, "hut five minutes later a. second man remarked: ' 'I always have a Welsh rarebit about this time in the evening, and how I'm going to get along without it I don't see.' " 'And I always have a cup of cocoa and some ginger snaps, and, I tell you, I'm blamed lonesome without 'em,' added the third. "Well, I can't explain how it was, but I began to think of sherry and crackers, and in less than two minutes I was as homesick as a boy. We sat and looked into the fire and kept silence si-lence for a time, and then one of the party sighed and said: " 'Boys, can we ever stand it for two weeks?' " 'Never!' replied the other three of us. " 'What shall we do?' " 'Go home in the morning.' "And start for home we did, and here I am, and when you get me off on another junket you'll have to carry me in a box and send a first-class hotel along after me." |