The sirup is put up in cans, or boiled down into sugar, which is molded into small cakes, and brings a high price.
Fig. 30.—Sap-yoke and Pails for gathering Sap.
"Sugaring off," as the boiling down of the sap is called, is quite an event. Often a number of people will be invited to go to the sugarhouse and take part in the operation.
Before the modern evaporator came into use "sugaring off" always occurred at night. This was necessary, because during the day the sap buckets had to be attended to. The young people would sing songs, tell stories, and eat sugar.
Some of the "sugar bushes" contain but a few trees and some contain one or two thousand or even more. A tree will yield from one to six pounds of sugar during a season.
Our country produces great quantities of sugar every year, but we use so much that we have to buy much more than we manufacture at home. It was not always in such common use, however, because people in olden times did not understand how to make it cheaply.
Long, long ago sugar was used only as a medicine. Don't you wish that all medicine to-day was as good as sugar? About seven hundred years ago an Italian nobleman died and left to his relatives, among other things, six pounds of sugar. His will caused considerable comment among the people, who said that no one family should be allowed to have so much sugar in its possession.