He is constantly tasting of it, however, to see if it is not almost syrup. He has a long, round stick, whittled smooth at one end, which he uses for this purpose, at the constant risk of burning his tongue.
The smoke blows in his face; he is grimy with ashes; he is altogether such a mass of dirt, stickiness, and sweetness, that his own mother wouldn't know him.
He likes to boil eggs with the hired man in the hot sap; he likes to roast potatoes in the ashes, and he would live in the camp day and night if he were permitted.
To sleep there with the men, and awake in the night and hear the wind in the trees, and see the sparks fly up to the sky, is a perfect realization of all the stories of adventures he has ever read.
He tells the other boys afterward that he heard something in the night that sounded very much like a bear. The hired man says that he was very much scared by the hooting of an owl.
The great occasions for the boy, though, are the times of "sugaring off." Sometimes this used to be done in the evening, and it was made the excuse for a frolic in the camp.
The neighbors were invited; sometimes even the pretty girls from the village, who filled all the woods with their sweet voices and merry laughter, were there, too.
The tree branches all show distinctly in the light of the fire, which lights up the bough shanty, the hogsheads, the buckets on the trees, and the group about the boiling kettles, until the scene is like something taken out of a fairy play.
At these sugar parties every one was expected to eat as much sugar as possible; and those who are practiced in it can eat a great deal.
It is a peculiar fact about eating warm maple sugar, that though you may eat so much of it one day as to be sick, you will want it the next day more than ever.