LEAFLET XLVIII.
THE MAPLE IN FEBRUARY.[65]
By ANNA BOTSFORD COMSTOCK.
Sap.
Strong as the sea and silent as the grave, it ebbs and flows unseen: Flooding the earth,—a fragrant tidal wave, with mists of deepening green,
—John B. Tabb.
"Tapping the sugar bush" are magical words to the country boy and girl. The winter which was at first so welcome with its miracle of snow, and its attendant joys of sleighing and skating, begins to pall by the last of February. Too many days the clouds hang low and the swirling flakes make out-of-door pursuits difficult. Then there comes a day when the south wind blows blandly and the snow settles into hard, marble-like drifts, and here and there a knoll appears bare, and soggy, and brown. It is then that there comes just a suggestion of spring in the air; and the bare trees show a flush of living red through their grayness and every spray grows heavy with swelling buds. Well do we older folk remember that in our own childhood after a few such days the father would say, "We will get the sap buckets down from the stable loft and wash them, for we can tap the sugar bush soon if this weather holds." In those days the buckets were made of staves, and were by no means so easily washed as are the metal buckets of to-day. Still do we recall the sickish smell of musty sap that greeted our nostrils when we poured the boiling water in to cleanse those old, brown buckets. During the long winter evenings we had all had something to do with the fashioning of the sap spiles made from selected stems of sumac; after some older one had removed half of the small branch lengthwise with a draw-shave we younger ones had cleared out the pith, thinking thirstily meanwhile of the sweet liquid which would sometime flow there.
With buckets and spiles ready when the momentous day came, the large, iron caldron kettle was loaded on a stoneboat together with the sap cask and log chain, the axe and various other utensils, and as many children as could find standing room; and then the oxen were hitched on and the procession started across the rough pasture to the woods where it eventually arrived after numerous stops for reloading almost everything but the kettle. When we came to the boiling-place we lifted the kettle into place and flanked it with two great logs, against which the fire was to be kindled. Meanwhile the oxen and stoneboat had returned to the house for a load of buckets; and the oxen blinking with bowed heads or with noses lifted aloft to keep the underbrush from striking their faces "geed and hawed" up hill and down dale through the woods, stopping here and there while the man with the auger bored holes in certain trees near other holes which had bled sweet juices in years gone by. When the auger was withdrawn the sap followed it and enthusiastic young tongues met it half way though they received more chips than sweetness therefrom. Then the spiles were driven in tightly with a wooden mallet.
Fig. 291. Sugar making in New York.