Before Posey hardly had time to realize the change, the city with its crowded houses and busy streets, its smoke and confusion, its glitter of wealth, its grime of poverty, was left behind, and she was seated by the side of Mrs. Hagood in the cars on her way to her new home, something over an hour’s ride distant.
Though yet early in March it was a sunny, spring-like day. Under the bland air the snow had almost disappeared from the brown fields, and only lingered in occasional patches of white in hollows and along sheltering fences. The willows by brookside ways were showing their early catkins, while the woods, distinct against the tender blue of the spring sky, by their reddening tinge told that life was already stirring in the leaf-buds, so soon to unfold.
In some of the woods that the train sped through, Posey caught glimpses of smoke curling up from small, weather-worn buildings, while from the trees around them hung buckets, some painted a bright red, others of shining tin; she could even now and then hear from the open car window a musical drip, drip, which the more increased her wonder.
“What are all those pails hanging to the trees for?” she finally asked. “And what is the sound just as though water was dropping?”
“Goodness alive, didn’t you ever see a sugar bush opened before?” inquired Mrs. Hagood. “That’s where they are making maple sugar and syrup; those are maple trees, and what you hear is the sap running; it’s been a good sap day, too.”
This explanation did not make the matter very clear to Posey, but what Mrs. Hagood meant was that the warmth of the spring day had caused a rapid upward flow of the sap, or juice of the tree, which had been stored in the roots through the winter; and by making incisions in the tree this sap, which is sweetest in the maple, is caught and boiled into syrup or sugar.
For all the outward attractions, Posey had already given some very earnest and anxious looks at Mrs. Hagood, with whom her home was now to be for an indefinite time. Child as she was, she quickly felt that there was nothing of the flimsy, the pretentious, about that lady. The substantial was stamped on every feature, and though her shawl was handsomer and her black silk dress of finer quality than she had ever seen Miss Grey wear, she was conscious that Mrs. Hagood lacked something the little teacher possessed—the essential quality that made the latter the true lady.
But the time had been short, or so it seemed, for the much there was to think and see, when Mrs. Hagood gathered up her numerous packages, and Posey found herself hurried out on the platform of a wayside station. Truly she was in the country. A few scattered farmhouses were in sight in the distance, but the little station stood between the far-reaching railroad tracks and the muddy country road wholly apart and alone. No one but themselves had alighted, and they were the sole occupants of the building, not even a station-master appearing in sight. “Is this a village?” Posey asked as she looked around in wide-eyed surprise.
“Mercy, no, child, the village is two miles from here.”
“And what a queer depot,” added Posey. “I never was in one before where there weren’t lots of people.”