FUN IN A SUGAR BUSH.
BY WILLIAM O. STODDARD.
"Well, yes, Jerry," remarked Salina Meadows, "old Mr. Wire'll be glad to have anybody come to see him that knows as much about sugar as you do."
"It's all the hobby he's got," said her brother Phin. "He makes the best maple sugar in all these parts. Whitest and cleanest. Biggest lot of it, too."
"I've heard him say," added Rush Potts, "that no man was ever too old to learn. Glad we could bring you along."
"There isn't much about sugar I don't know," replied Jerry Buntley, modestly, with a pull at his dog-skin gloves to make them fit tighter. "You just ought to see a real sugar plantation once."
"I would like to," said Hannah Potts, all the red in her rosy face coming to the surface to meet the wind that blew in her face from the direction of old Mr. Wire's great forest on the hill-side.
They were all cuddling down in Elder Meadows's great box sleigh, and Phin Meadows was putting the sorrel span along the road in a way that made their bells dance lively enough, for the March thaw had only just begun, and the sleighing was capital.
Jerry Buntley had told them more about sugar that day than they had ever heard before. It was a great treat to be invited to a maple-sugaring at old Mr. Wire's, and Jerry's country cousins were glad of having something worth while to take with them by way of payment; that is, they were glad to take Jerry.
He was glad to go, and he talked sugar until every soul in the sleigh thought he could taste candy, and Phin found himself comparing the color of his sorrel team to that of the five pounds his mother sent back to Barnes's grocery store, because, as she said, "She wasn't going to pay any 'leven cents a pound for building sand."
It was not many minutes before they pulled up in front of old Mr. Wire's big rambling old farm-house, and there were Jim and Sally Wire coming out to meet them. Old Mrs. Wire was in the doorway, and she looked twenty years younger as soon as they had a look at her husband. Mainly because the difference in their ages was a good deal more than that.
Nobody knew how tall Mr. Wire would have been if he had stood up, but the oldest old ladies around Lender's Mills village all said he'd had that stoop in his shoulders ever since they'd known him.
"My mother used to say," said Elder Meadows, "that old Wire's father was a short, stocky man, and built his log-house to fit himself, and so when his son got taller'n he was himself, he had to hold his head down, 'specially coming through the door."
There he was now, and the visitors had not been in the house five minutes before Salina Meadows told how much Jerry Buntley knew about sugar.
"His father sells tons of it, and his brother's a clerk in a sugar store, and his uncle's a book-keeper in a sugar refinery in the city—"
"Ten stories high!" put in Jerry, with a down look of modesty.
"—and he's seen sugar plantations, and molasses factories, and where they make all sorts of candy."
"You don't say!" exclaimed Mrs. Wire. "I'm glad you fetched him along."
"Wa'al, so'm I," said old Mr. Wire. "No man ain't ever too old to l'arn. I've only been a-b'ilin' sap for a leetle risin' of fifty year, and I don't know much. You're jest in time. The sun's lookin' down warm to-day, and we was jest a-wantin' to set out for the bush."
"It isn't the fur-away bush," said Mrs. Wire; "it's that there patch nighest the house. The trees ain't been tapped this five year, and they'll run the best kind."
"There'll be more here by-and-by," said Sally Wire. "Don't take your things off. We'll have a real good time."
Old Mr. Wire took Jerry Buntley right along with him—under his wing, as you might say. He asked him questions, too, and nobody could guess how many times Jerry made him exclaim, "You don't say!" or, "Do tell, now, is that so?"
The forest had been left standing on all that hill-side for nothing else in the world but sugar. It was not half an hour before the Wires and their visitors were crunching over the crust among the trees, or standing around the great fires that had been built and lit before they came. Every fire had a great iron kettle on it, and every kettle was bubbling for dear life, except when a dash of cold sap was ladled into it from the barrel that stood under the nearest tree.
"It's afternoon now," said Sally Wire. "I do hope the other folks'll get here before it's too dark. But then we can have a good time at the house in the evening."
"Boys," said old Mr. Wire, "if you want to help, you jest take them two auger bits and them spiles, and go and tap a fresh lot of trees over there to the east'ard. Jim and I'll go round with the buckets."
Wonderfully white and clean were all his buckets and shoulder-yokes, and his wooden troughs that caught the sap as it dripped into them from the ends of the wooden spiles he had driven into the trees he had tapped already. There was plenty of work for him and his son, and so Jerry Buntley and Phin Meadows and Rush Potts marched away to the east, while the girls hung around the kettles, and tested the syrup, in every way they knew how, to see if any of it had boiled long enough.
"We'll have plenty to sugar off with in the house this evening," said Sally Wire; "but we mustn't let any of it get burned."
Jerry took possession of an auger and a bundle of spiles, and Phin took the other auger, and Rush Potts said he'd just go along to learn how.
"Catching cold are you, Phineas?" asked Jerry, as he began to work his auger into a splendidly tall tree, and Phin and Rush both were seized with a sudden fit of coughing,
"Ugh, ugh, ugh—no—ugh—I guess not. Bore it deep, Jerry. Old man Wire is particular about that."
"Guess I know how to tap a tree," said Jerry. "The sun shines right on this one, and the sap'll run well."
"Ugh—ugh—ugh," coughed Rush Potts. "I guess I'll help Phin. He doesn't know as much as you do."
"I should say not," diffidently replied Jerry; but he had finished his first tree quite skillfully, and now he went for his second with all the zeal of a true sportsman.
"Phineas," he shouted, a moment later, "when you come to a maple of this kind, knock off the outer bark. It bores easier."
"All right," replied Phin, with his mouth half full of his handkerchief. But he added, in a lower voice: "Rush, stop rolling in the snow. He's tapping a hickory this time."
"T'other was an elm. Oh, if he isn't fun! What'll old man Wire say to that?"
"Keep still. Get up, can't you? I can't bore a hole worth a cent. Give me a spile."
Jerry was an enthusiastic sugar-maker, and his rapidity of work was a credit to him.
"Maple this time," said Phin, at the end of Jerry's next job. "But look at what he's doing now."
"Beech! There'll be more sugar 'n old Wire'll know what to do with."
"We must pitch in, Rush. I want to be on hand when old Wire comes to see if his spiles are set right. Maybe it'll kill him."
"I've tapped pretty nearly two trees to their one," said Jerry to himself, "but I won't boast of it. Here's a remarkably fine tree, right in the sun. I hope they won't make any mistakes."
With that he started his twist of steel into the yielding wood of one of the noblest silver-birches in all that forest, and in a wonderfully short time there was another spile fitted. Whether there would be any need for Mr. Wire to put a sap trough under the end of that spile was quite another question.
The crust was thick, and bore very well, so that the girls had no wading to do in going from one fire to another; and Jim Wire and his father worked like beavers at emptying the sap troughs, and carrying in the almost colorless, sweetish-tasting liquid their trees had yielded them.
"Now, Jim," said Mr. Wire at last, "we'd better take a lot of troughs and follow them fellers. 'Twon't do to waste any sap."
Phin and Rush saw them coming, and at once stopped work. So did Jerry Buntley, for he had some suggestions to make about those spiles. It seemed to him that some of them were bored too small for the quantity of sap which was expected to run through them.
He and the others came up just as the gray-headed old sugar-maker stopped in front of Jerry's first tree, and they got there in time to wink hard at Jim Wire. All three of them stepped around behind Jerry and Mr. Wire.
"You've sot that there spile in jest about right, Mr. Buntley," said Mr. Wire, without changing a muscle of his wrinkled face; "but this kind of maple don't give any sugar at this season of the year. It isn't a winter maple; it's the kind we call an ellum."
"Ah! Oh yes! Strange I didn't notice."
"Doesn't yield anything but brown sugar—common brown sugar. It's all right, though. I declar'!"
He was looking at the shell-bark hickory now, and that specimen of Jerry's work was a hard pull on his politeness.
"Jim," he said, "put a trough under thar. It's a changin' world. Things isn't what they used to be. Mebbe thar's sugar into hickory nowadays."
"Hickory?" gasped Jerry. "That's a fact. I kind o' didn't look up to see what it was."
"And ye couldn't ha' told by the bark; of course not. I'd say—now—there—well—exactly—nobody ain't never too old to l'arn. Beech, bass-wood, ellum, black walnut, birch—if thar'd been a saxafrax, he'd ha' gone and tapped it for root-beer."
There was an explosion behind them just then, for the three other boys gave it up the moment they saw it had been too much for old Mr. Wire.
"Put troughs to all on 'em, Jim," said the latter, solemnly, recovering himself. "Stop your ignorant, on-mannerly laughin'. Mr. Buntley, jest you come back to the kittles, and tell me over ag'in what you was a-sayin' about surrup."
Jerry was beginning to understand the tree joke, but he could not see why Phin Meadows should roll Rush Potts and Jim Wire over in the snow the way he did, for he said to himself:
"It's a mistake any man would make. One tree is just like another. I wonder how Mr. Wire tells them apart? I think I will ask him before we go to the house."
So he did, and the old man answered him with cast-iron politeness that he knew his trees, just as he did his dogs, by their bark.
When the day in the sugar bush was over, however, and when, after supper, the fun in the house began, with a round dozen more of country boys and girls to keep it up, Jerry heard all sorts of things. The syrup, carried in and boiled down in the kettles over the kitchen fire, was cooled, on the snow, and every other way, into "hickory sugar," "birch candy," "elm taffy," "beech twist," and all sorts of uncommon sweetness, and Jerry overheard Mrs. Wire saying to Hannah Potts:
"You don't say! Did he really tap 'em all? He looks as if he might know suthin', too. Mebbe he was jokin'."
All the rest were, except old Mr. Wire; and when the sorrel span was brought out to take home the sleigh-load that came from Lender's Mills village, he said to Jerry Buntley:
"No man ain't never too old to l'arn, and it wasn't knowin' too much made me stoop-shouldered. Thar's a heap o' sense in what you told me about that new way of settlin' surrup."
Nevertheless, Jim Wire went around the next morning and took away all the troughs from under the trees which had not yielded any sap, and put them where they were likely to do more good.