THE LINE OF BATTLE Portlaw's camp in the southern foot-hills of the Adirondacks was as much a real camp as the pretentious constructions at Newport are real cottages.

A modesty, akin to smugness, designates them all with Heep-like humbleness under a nomenclature now tolerated through usage; and, from the photographs sent him, Hamil was very much disgusted to find a big, handsome two-story house, solidly constructed of timber and native stone, dominating a clearing in the woods, and distantly flanked by the superintendent's pretty cottage, the guides' quarters, stables, kennels, coach-houses, and hothouses with various auxiliary buildings still farther away within the sombre circle of the surrounding pines.
To this aggravation of elaborate structures Portlaw, in a spasm of modesty, had given the name of "Camp Chickadee"; and now he wanted to stultify the remainder of his domain with concrete terraces, bridges, lodges, and Gothic towers in various and pleasing stages of ruin.
So Hamil's problem presented itself as one of those annoyingly simple ones, entirely dependent upon Portlaw and good taste; and Portlaw had none.
He had, however, some thirty thousand acres of woods and streams and lakes fenced in with a twelve-foot barrier of cattle-proof wire--partly a noble virgin wilderness unmarred by man-trails; partly composed of lovely second growth scarcely scarred by that, vile spoor which is the price Nature pays for the white-hided invaders who walk erect, when not too drunk, and who foul and smear and stain and desolate water and earth and air around them.
Why Portlaw desired to cut his wilderness into a mincing replica of some emasculated British royal forest nobody seemed able to explain.

While at Palm Beach he had made two sage observations to Hamil concerning the sacredness of trees; one was that there are no trees in a Scotch deer forest, which proved to his satisfaction that trees are unnecessary; the other embodied his memories of seeing a herd of calf-like fallow deer decorating the grass under the handsome oaks and beeches of some British nobleman's park.
Why Portlaw concerned himself at all with his wild, out-world domain was a mystery, too; for he admitted that he spent almost all day playing cards indoors or contriving with his cook some new and succulent experiment in the gastronomical field.
Sometimes he cast a leaden eye outdoors when his dogs were exercised from the kennel; rarely, and always unwillingly, he followed Malcourt to the hatchery to watch the stripping, or to the exotic pheasantry to inspect the breeding of birds entirely out of place in such a climate.
He did like to see a fat deer; the fatter the better; he was accustomed, too, to poke his thumb into the dead plumage of a plump grouse when Malcourt's men laid out the braces, on which he himself never drew trigger; and which interested him only when on the table.
He wanted plenty of game and fish on the place for that reason; he wanted his guests to shoot and fish for that reason, too.

Otherwise he cared nothing for his deer, his grouse, and his trout.

And why he suddenly had been bitten with a mania for "improving" the flawless wilderness about him, even Malcourt did not know.
Hamil, therefore, was prepared for a simple yet difficult problem--to do as little harm to the place as possible, and to appease Portlaw at the same time, and curb his meddlesome and iconoclastic proclivities.
Spring had begun early in the North; shallow snows were fading from the black forest soil along the streams' edges, and from the pebbled shores of every little lake; already the soft ice was afloat on pool and pond; muskrats swam; the eggs of the woodcock were beginning their chilly incubation; and in one sheltered spring-hole behind the greenhouse Malcourt discovered a solemn frog afloat.