p. 26: Jack, stretched flat on his stomach, a red handkerchief over his head, is deep in my geology book.
p. 34: The reason this Diary seems so good-humored, is because it’s always written after eating. Never write a field journal on an empty stomach. You’ll hate yourself, if you do, when you read it over after eating. Every word of this is second thought, well considered and digested, with a day’s good hard work behind it.
p. 39: All to-day rhymes buzzed in my head. This one hardest, which I can’t locate:
Let me feel maggots crawling in the sod,
Or else—let me be God!
Just now, ‘Hist, said Kate the Queen,’ is the line bothering me, which I think is Browning. All this may be very foolish, but many things called foolish at home seem sensible up here. Anyway, most things that seem sensible at home appear foolish up here.
p. 45,: on the trail: Jack is putting tea-leaves on his sore eye, and reading the Fortnightly Review with the other. Our portable library contains ‘Pelham’ (Bulwer-Lytton), ‘Ardath’ (Marie C[orelli])—the Professor’s favorite, ‘Tom Sawyer,’ mine, a magazine or two, and some funny books on the ‘Hints to Explorers’ order. King, who is now asleep with his mouth open, and Simon, don’t read. It feels like rain.
p. 58: Now, we’re lying on three solid feet of spruce boughs spread on soggy quick sand, yet sloshing our backs in the ooze if we move—the worst camp made yet. You could cut the air in this tent, thick with the stink of sore-rubbed horse-blankets which we must sleep in, and the mosquito-corpse fetor of never-washed clothing. Rheumatism numbs my side. Where’s the Professor? He ought to meet us here now. Eaten by ‘skeets and green worms on Yenlo Mountain, I guess. Well, here’s for a page of ‘Tom Sawyer,’ to bring on drowsiness—but sleep, never!
p. 64, Miller is reading Jack’s ‘Pelham’.
p 69, Jack is reading a Government Survey report.
p. 70: Now he [Jack] is reading “Tom Sawyer,” and the Professor [Cook] the Fortnightly Review—for the first time in his life, I guess.