He was looking at the shell-bark hickory now, and that specimen of Jerry's work was a hard pull on his politeness.
"Jim," he said, "put a trough under thar. It's a changin' world. Things isn't what they used to be. Mebbe thar's sugar into hickory nowadays."
"Hickory?" gasped Jerry. "That's a fact. I kind o' didn't look up to see what it was."
"And ye couldn't ha' told by the bark; of course not. I'd say—now—there—well—exactly—nobody ain't never too old to l'arn. Beech, bass-wood, ellum, black walnut, birch—if thar'd been a saxafrax, he'd ha' gone and tapped it for root-beer."
There was an explosion behind them just then, for the three other boys gave it up the moment they saw it had been too much for old Mr. Wire.
"Put troughs to all on 'em, Jim," said the latter, solemnly, recovering himself. "Stop your ignorant, on-mannerly laughin'. Mr. Buntley, jest you come back to the kittles, and tell me over ag'in what you was a-sayin' about surrup."
Jerry was beginning to understand the tree joke, but he could not see why Phin Meadows should roll Rush Potts and Jim Wire over in the snow the way he did, for he said to himself:
"It's a mistake any man would make. One tree is just like another. I wonder how Mr. Wire tells them apart? I think I will ask him before we go to the house."
So he did, and the old man answered him with cast-iron politeness that he knew his trees, just as he did his dogs, by their bark.
When the day in the sugar bush was over, however, and when, after supper, the fun in the house began, with a round dozen more of country boys and girls to keep it up, Jerry heard all sorts of things. The syrup, carried in and boiled down in the kettles over the kitchen fire, was cooled, on the snow, and every other way, into "hickory sugar," "birch candy," "elm taffy," "beech twist," and all sorts of uncommon sweetness, and Jerry overheard Mrs. Wire saying to Hannah Potts: