Our Friend John Burroughs

by Clara Barrus

Then the sap bush in the groin of the hill, and but a few minutes' walk from the house, what a feature that was! In winter and in summer, what delightful associations I have with it! I know each of its great sugar maples as I know my friends or the members of the family. Each has a character of its own, and in sap-producing capacity they differ greatly. A fringe of the great trees stood out in the open fields; these were the earliest to run.

In early March we used to begin to make ready for sugar-making by overhauling the sap "spiles," resharpening the old ones, and making new ones. The old-fashioned awkward sap-gouge was used in tapping in those days, and the "spiles" or spouts were split out of basswood blocks with this gouge, and then sharpened so as to fit the half-round gash which the gouge made in the tree. The dairy milk-pans were used to catch the sap, and huge iron kettles to boil it down in.

When the day came to tap the bush, the caldrons, the hogsheads, and the two hundred or more pans with the bundles of spiles were put upon the sled and drawn by the oxen up to the boiling-place in the sap bush. Father and Brother Hiram did the tapping, using an axe to cut the gash in the tree, and to drive in the gouge below it to make a place for the spile, while one of my younger brothers and I carried the pans and placed them in position.

It was always a glad time with me; the early birds were singing and calling, the snowbanks were melting, the fields were getting bare, the roads drying, and spring tokens were on every hand. We gathered the sap by hand in those days, two pails and a neck-yoke. It was sturdy work. We would usually begin about three or four o'clock, and by five have the one hundred and fifty pailfuls of sap in the hogsheads. When the sap ran all night, we would begin the gathering in the morning. The syruping-off usually took place at the end of the second day's boiling, when two or three hundred pailfuls of sap had been reduced to four or five of syrup. In the March or April twilight, or maybe after dark, we would carry those heavy pails of syrup down to the house, where the liquid was strained while still hot. The reduction of it to sugar was done upon the kitchen stove, from three hundred to five hundred pounds being about the average annual yield.

The bright warm days at the boiling-place I love best to remember; the robins running about over the bare ground or caroling from the treetops, the nuthatches calling, the crows walking about the brown fields, the bluebirds flitting here and there, the cows lowing or restless in the barnyard.

When I think of the storied lands across the Atlantic,—England, France, Germany, Italy, so rich in historical associations, steeped in legend and poetry, the very look of the fields redolent of the past,—and then turn to my own native hills, how poor and barren they seem!—not one touch anywhere of that which makes the charm of the Old World—no architecture, no great names; in fact, no past. They look naked and prosy, yet how I love them and cling to them! They are written over with the lives of the first settlers that cleared the fields and built the stone walls—simple, common-place lives, worthy and interesting, but without the appeal of heroism or adventure.

The land here is old, geologically, dating back to the Devonian Age, the soil in many places of decomposed old red sandstone; but it is new in human history, having been settled only about one hundred and fifty years.

Time has worn down the hills and mountains so that all the outlines of the country are gentle and flowing. The valleys are long, open, and wide; the hills broad and smooth, no angles or abruptness, or sharp contrasts anywhere. Hence it is not what is called a picturesque land—full of bits of scenery that make the artist's fingers itch. The landscape has great repose and gentleness, so far as long, sweeping lines and broad, smooth slopes can give this impression. It is a land which has never suffered violence at the hands of the interior terrestrial forces; nothing is broken or twisted or contorted or thrust out or up abruptly. The strata are all horizontal, and the steepest mountain-slopes clothed with soil that nourishes large forest growths.

I stayed at home, working on the farm in summer and going to school in winter, till I was seventeen. From the time I was fourteen I had had a desire to go away to school. I had a craving for knowledge which my brothers did not share. One fall when I was about fifteen I had the promise from Father that I might go to school at the Academy in the village that winter. But I did not go. Then the next fall I had the promise of going to the Academy at Harpersfield, where one of the neighbor's boys, Dick Van Dyke, went. How I dreamed of Harpersfield! That fall I did my first ploughing, stimulated to it by the promise of Harpersfield. It was in September, in the lot above the sugar bush—cross-ploughing, to prepare the ground for rye. How many days I ploughed, I do not remember; but Harpersfield was the lure at the end of each furrow, I remember that. To this day I cannot hear the name without seeing a momentary glow upon my mental horizon—a finger of enchantment is for an instant laid upon me.

But I did not go to Harpersfield. When the time drew near for me to go, Father found himself too poor, or the expense looked too big—none of the other boys had had such privileges, and why should I? So I swallowed my disappointment and attended the home district school for another winter. Yet I am not sure but I went to Harpersfield after all. The desire, the yearning to go, the effort to make myself worthy to go, the mental awakening, and the high dreams, were the main matter. I doubt if the reality would have given me anything more valuable than these things. The aspiration for knowledge opens the doors of the mind and makes ready for her coming.