SUGAR MAKING.
The long, cold winter was past; spring had come, and with it sugar
making, the carnival season, in the open air, among the trees.
The boys had the preparations for sugar making in an advanced stage. A
new camp had been selected on a dry slope, wood had been cut, the tubs
distributed, and they were waiting for Bart and a good day. Both came
together; and on the day following the close of his school, at an
early hour they hurried off to tap the trees.
Spring and gladness were in the air. The trill of the blue-bird was
a thrill; and the first song of the robin was full of lilac and apple
blossoms. The softened winds fell to zephyrs, and whispered strange
mysterious legends to the brown silent trees, and murmured lovingly
over the warming beds of the slumbering flowers. Young juices were
starting up under rough bark, and young blood and spirits throbbed in
the veins of the boys, and loud and repeated bursts of joyous voices
gushed with the fulness of the renewing power of the season.
The day, with its eager hope, strength and joyousness, filled Bart
to the eyes, and his spirit in exultation breaking from the unnatural
thrall that had for many months of darkness and anxious labor
overshadowed it, went with a bound of old buoyancy, and he started
with laughing, open brow, and springy step, over the spongy ground, to
the poetry of life in the woods.
That one day they tapped all the trees. The next, the kettles were
hung on the large crane, the immense logs were rolled up, the kettles
filled with sap, and the blue smoke of the first fire went curling up
gracefully through the tree-tops. What an event, the first fire! Not
as in New England, sugar in the West is never made until the winter
snow has disappeared, and the surface has become dry, and the woods
pleasant, and the opening day at the boiling was as brilliant as its
predecessor.
Bart and Edward, with a yoke of steers, gathered the sap towards
evening, and George tended the kettles; many curious bright-eyed
chickadees boldly ventured up about the works, peeping, flitting,
and examining, with head first on one side and then on the other, the
funny doings of these humans in their dominions, and searching for the
store of raw pork, which, according to their recollection, ought to be
hid away somewhere near by.
The boys had pulled down, removed and rebuilt their old snug cabin,
with one end open to the broad and roaring fire; in the bottom of
which, over its floor, were placed a large quantity of sweet bright
straw, and two or three heavy blankets.
The "run" made it necessary to boil all night; and filling the kettles
and adjusting the fires, Bart and the boys, hungry and tired, went
up to supper and the chores; after which Bart and Edward, taking the
former's rifle, and lighted by a hickory torch, returned to the camp
for the night--Edward really to sleep, sweet and unbroken, in the
cabin, and Bart to take care of the kettles and fires, to muse and
dream, and think bright, strange thoughts, and watch the effects of
the lights and shadows, listen to the dropping of the sap into the
buckets, and the boding owls, whose melancholy notes harmonized with,
rather than interrupted, the solemn effect of deepest night. Man
easily reverts to savagery and nature; and this tendency was marked in
Bart, whom this new recurrence to old habits of wood-life, so dear to
him, filled with such pleasant sensations of joyous unrest, that until
near the coming dawn he was disinclined to sleep, and when he did, the
first note of an old robin from the topmost twig of a giant old maple
awoke him fresh to the labor and enjoyment of another resplendent day.
And so the days followed each other, and the spring deepened. Myriads
of flower-beds shot up through the dead leaves, and opened out their
frail and wondrously tinted petals for a single day, and faded. Not
a new one opened--not a cloud or tint varied the sky--not a note of
a bird or tap of a woodpecker, that was not marked by Bart, to whom
Nature had at least given the power to appreciate and love her lighter
works.