Fan McQuade and her three sons nodded together in solemn appreciation. Science and tradition were for once agreed. They had caught the perfect boiling off point. And the boys rushed away to pour off the contents of the huge boiling pan into the cooling tins.
Now it was McQuade's time to bestir himself as host.
From the dark outside he brought in other pans of clean frozen snow, which he had carefully prepared against this moment. He laid the pans and paddles about the table and inviting everybody to choose a pan of snow he went to bring the wax syrup. To the unitiated it looked like a bare banquet, a pan of snow and a paddle. But the eating of "wax" is the one feast that requires neither condiment nor foil.
"This," said McQuade, settling himself behind a huge pan of wax, "is the one time when I can understand this making of sugar. All the rest of the year I think of these groves of idle trees,—there's nothing in the world so idle as a maple tree—and every one of them worth a pocketful of money, and I wonder at Fan's lack of business sense. Why doesn't she cut the timber down?"
He spoke of her impersonally, as though she might have been, perhaps, a neighbor at home in the next county.
"But," he concluded, "when I sit down with a pan of wax in me arms I can understand it all. She keeps the trees doing nothing the year 'round just to furnish her her pan of wax. And, like the good Yankee that she is, she has all the better of the bargain, at that."
"Hear him!" his wife retorted. "And if I dared to have as much as one live tree of these groves cut down he'd go crazy. I think he's a heathen pagan. I think he comes up in the summer to worship in the groves like the old people did in the Bible."
"They were high thinkin' people, I take it," said McQuade, ready for contention. "But the times were against them."
"I wonder," said Fan McQuade slyly. "Or were they leaving behind a good hard job of haying or something when they ran off up into the groves for their sacrifices?"
"That's right!" complained McQuade. "Go on and tell all the neighbors about me and disgrace me! These two young people don't think bad enough about me. The first time they laid eyes on me they thought I was a bank robber, at the very politest."