"'I said,' says McGonigle, speakin' careful an' precise—'To be sure I said part of it under me breath, but I said it—I said: 'To hell with the Anti-pope'.'
"Now the Anti-pope, as you must know," McQuade explained, "the Anti-pope was the Divil himself.
"Then there was a too-ru! The Divil was that mad that he stood still and lepped straight up an' down. An' he was so enraged at McGonigle that he got his foot up into the stirrup beside McGonigle's, as though he was tryin' to come up at him.
"'Glory be!' says McGonigle, lookin' down between prayers. 'Look at the Omadhon tryin' to get on his own back!'
"But, as McGonigle looked down he saw things. He was an expert farrier, an' he knew that that was no proper foot for a right horse. And, at this point, he was enough of a theologian to remember that once a man sees the Divil's cloven hoof he is not lost yet.
"An still the Divil raged, an' stamped, an' struggled with his foot up in the stirrup.
"'That'll do,' says McGonigle, polite but hasty, as he threw his leg free over the saddle, to jump. 'There's no room here for two. If you're goin' to get on, I'm goin' to get off!'"
The youngest of the McQuade boys came and laid a pan of clean packed snow on the table in front of his mother. This was part of the essential rites of the sugaring off. The boys had, of course, barometers and modern polarization tests which told them scientifically when the heavy syrup, the concentration of many boilings of sap, was sufficiently boiled down so that when allowed to cool rapidly it would solidify into a clear brittle cake with a polarization of over ninety-five. Fan McQuade believed in all these things as fully as did her sons. She lived with her boys and never allowed anything in their business, or in new ways of doing old work, to get beyond her. But she—and they too—still trusted her own test as to when a boiling of sugar was ready to set properly.
So, when their thermometer and barometer showed them that the proper point of condensation had been reached, the boys came with a dipper and poured the boiling sugar before her on the smooth surface of the pan of snow. Then they stood gravely around and watched while the long criss-crossed tendrills of sugar which had been made in the pouring hardened over the face of the snow.
Fan McQuade took a little white paddle of polished maple, as hard almost as a piece of steel, and began tapping gently at the hardening, waxy bars of sugar. As the thin tendrils of sugar stiffened into long crystals she struck harder, and they could hear a ringing from them like the twang of distant skates on ice. Then, as the sugar hardened to full brittleness the bars began to break stiffly under her sharp blows, and then to crack and snap and fly apart like live things.