March 8.—With fuel so dear and maple syrup so cheap sugar-making is about the most peculiar job a man can get at. The harder you work the more money you lose. It involves the whole problem of the producer and consumer, and if you try to think it out you are likely to get as fatally twisted as the man who was kicked down a spiral staircase. I didn't try to think it out, but as I have a sweet tooth and all the members of the family have sweet teeth I decided to make sugar—in moderation. Fifty trees are not likely to give enough sap to make more syrup than one family will need in a year and the work of boiling in will not be too hard for one leisurely man. Besides, the dead limbs that have fallen from the trees in the past year will furnish enough fuel. Taking sugar-making in this way it resolves itself into a kind of holiday in the woods and I am strong on holidays. My favourite saint is St. Kavin for
"His calendar unrolled
With new feast days every year."
When a barrelful of sap had been gathered I took the new boiling pan to the woods and prepared to enjoy myself. Now, don't interrupt to tell me that I should have an up-to-date evaporator and all that sort of thing. I know it would make the work easier and more scientific, but the initial cost would be too great. A sheet-iron pan made by the tinsmith is more within my range, and if it leaks at every rivet-hole to begin with, that is my affair. I can cure that by using furnace cement and by boiling some oatmeal in the pan before beginning with the sap. I also know that I should have an arch instead of a trench cut through a cradle-knoll for the fire, for I have read all the advertisements of the best appliances for making maple sugar, but a man must cut his coat according to his cloth, and even if my temper had "Fourteen rattles and a button on it" before I got that sieve of a pan working right I am not going to tell about it. No one heard the remarks I made except the birds and I shall take a chance on a bird of the air reporting the matter.
When I finally got the pan caulked and the sap boiling briskly the world began to look brighter. Practically all the birds had come back over night. Killdeers and meadow-larks were calling, song-sparrows and horned larks were singing, bluebirds were flashing past and shedding music, and the crows, blackbirds, jays, and robins were gossiping everywhere. A south wind was blowing just enough to make a good draught under the pan and the sun was looking down on everything "Fur's I cud look or listen" and finding it good. Now, most people, when their work is going right and they are feeling happy, begin to whistle. I do not. Trained musicians have told me in confidence that my whistling sounds "like a hog in a high wind" and I have long since given up the practice—by request. My favourite relaxation is to let a few lines of poetry begin drumming in my head. I let that inward voice which puts all our thoughts in shape for us sing or chant the poetry for me over and over until I have tasted all its sweetness. On the particular day I have in mind the poem that thrust itself on me was one of Poe's:
"In the fairest of our valleys,
By good angels tenanted—"
But try as I would I could not recall the next two lines of the stanza. After repeating these two lines indefinitely, while my eyes and ears were taking in all that was going on about me in nature, I skipped to the next stanza which I could remember:
"Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
From its roof did float and flow—
But this, all this, was in the olden
Time long ago."
But Poe is not the poet for the open air and the woods. His gloomy imaginings began to overshadow the day:
"Dropping from out their condor wings
Invisible woe."