For the Companion.
IN THE BACKWOODS.
In Five Chapters.–Chap. I.
By C. A. Stephens.
We were boiling down "salts" that winter in Black Ash Swamp,–not epsom salts, but an extract from the lye of wood ashes. The ashes were boiled much as maple sap is boiled in order to obtain sugar.
I do not know whether the reader ever heard of such a thing. It was one of many ventures which Edward Martin, Vet Chase and myself made when we were boys up in the Maine backwoods in order to obtain a little money.
Black Ash Swamp was four or five miles up Mud Stream, a small tributary of the Penobscot. It was situated on "wild" land, as it was called, and was full of yellow ash, black ash and elm.
We had gone there early in November. Our first work was to fell the great ash-trees and cut them up so that the wood could be burned in ricks. Many of the trees were very old, nearly lifeless, and punky at the heart; but they made an abundance of ashes.
There is no wood in the world from which such quantities of ashes can be secured; and that is the reason, I suppose, why the tree is called ash. Nor is there another tree whose ashes make so strong a lye. It was for this reason that we came here to make "salts."
We brought up on our raft twenty old flour-barrels, to be used as leach-tubs. These were set up in a semi-circle round our boiling-place, which was a long stone "arch." A pole and lumber-shed served us as a camp.
We used to sit there evenings, and by the light of the fire under the boiling kettles of lye, try to read Æsop's fables in Latin, and I never to this day take up my old Latin reader without seeming to hear the steady drip-drop of those twenty leach-tubs.