The next day after "tapping," those of us large enough to wear the neck-yoke donned this badge of servitude and with its help brought pails of sap to the kettle, and the "boiling" began. As the evening shades gathered, how delicious was the odor of the sap steam permeating the woods farther than the shafts of fire-light pierced the gloom! How weird and delightful was this night experience in the woods! and how cheerfully we swallowed the smoke which the contrary wind seemed ever to turn toward us! We poked the fire to send the sparks upward and now and then we added more sap from the barrel and removed the scum from the boiling liquid with a skimmer which was thrust into the cleft end of a stick to provide it with a sufficiently long handle. As the evening wore on we drew closer to each other as we told the stories of the Indians and the bears and panthers that had roamed these woods when our father was a little boy; and there came to each of us a disquieting suspicion that perhaps they were not all gone yet, for everything seemed possible in those night-shrouded woods; and our hearts suddenly jumped into our throats when nearby there sounded the tremulous, blood-curdling cry of the screech owl.
It was the most fun to gather the sap in the warmer mornings, when on the mounds the red squaw-berries were glistening through a frosty veil; then we looked critically at the tracks in the snow to see what visitors had come sniffing around our buckets. We felt nothing but scorn for him who could not translate correctly those hieroglyphics on the film of soft snow that made white again the soiled drifts. Rabbit, skunk, squirrel, mouse, muskrat, fox: we knew them all by their tracks.
After about three days of gathering and boiling the sap, came the "syruping down." During all that afternoon we added no more sap, and we watched carefully the tawny steaming mass in the kettle; and when it threatened to boil over we threw in a thin slice of fat pork which seemed to have some mysterious, calming influence. The odor grew more and more delicious, and finally the syrup was pronounced sufficiently thick. The kettle was swung off the logs and the syrup dripped through a cloth strainer into the carrying pail. Oh! the blackness of the material left on that strainer! but it was "clean woods-dirt" and never destroyed our faith in the maple sugar any more than did the belief that our friends were made of "dirt" destroy our friendship for them.
Now the old stave bucket and the sumac spile are gone, and in their place a patent galvanized spile not only conducts the sap but holds in place a tin bucket carefully covered. The old caldron kettle is broken or lies rusting in the shed. In its place are evaporating vats placed over furnaces with chimneys, built in the new-fangled sugar houses. The maple molasses of to-day seems to us a pale and anæmic liquid and lacks just that delicious flavor of the rich, dark nectar which we, with the help of cinders and smoke and various other things, brewed of yore in the open woods.
While sugar-making interests us chiefly as one of our own industries, yet we must not forget that it is based upon the life processes of the maple tree, and in studying about it we may be able to learn important facts about the tree which we have chosen for our study.
Questions on the Maple Tree.
1. How does the maple tree look in winter? Describe it or sketch it.
2. Are the buds on the twigs opposite or alternate?
3. Are the tips of the twigs the same color as the bark on the larger limbs and trunk?
4. If you can draw, make a pencil sketch, natural size, of three inches square of bark of the maple tree trunk.