rom
the middle side-hill lot, some forty or fifty rods from the house, and
is now brought down in pipes; in my time, in pump-logs. It was always an
event when the old logs had to be taken up and new ones put down. I saw
the logs renewed twice in my time; once poplar logs were used, and once
hemlock, both rather short-lived. A man from a neighboring town used
to come with his long auger and bore the logs--a spectacle I was never
tired of looking at.

Then the sap bush in the groin of the hill, and but a few minutes' walk
from the house, what a feature that was! In winter and in summer, what
delightful associations I have with it! I know each of its great sugar
maples as I know my friends or the members of the family. Each has a
character of its own, and in sap-producing capacity they differ greatly.
A fringe of the great trees stood out in the open fields; these were the
earliest to run.

In early March we used to begin to make ready for sugar-making by
overhauling the sap "spiles," resharpening the old ones, and making new
ones. The old-fashioned awkward sap-gouge was used in tapping in those
days, and the "spiles" or spouts were split out of basswood blocks with
this gouge, and then sharpened so as to fit the half-round gash which
the gouge made in the tree. The dairy milk-pans were used to catch the
sap, and huge iron kettles to boil it down in.

When the day came to tap the bush, the caldrons, the hogsheads, and the
two hundred or more pans with the bundles of spiles were put upon the
sled and drawn by the oxen up to the boiling-place in the sap bush.
Father and Brother Hiram did the tapping, using an axe to cut the gash
in the tree, and to drive in the gouge below it to make a place for
the spile, while one of my younger brothers and I carried the pans and
placed them in position.

It was always a glad time with me; the early birds were singing and
calling, the snowbanks were melting, the fields were getting bare, the
roads drying, and spring tokens were on every hand. We gathered the sap
by hand in those days, two pails and a neck-yoke. It was sturdy work.
We would usually begin about three or four o'clock, and by five have the
one hundred and fifty pailfuls of sap in the hogsheads. When the sap ran
all night, we would begin the gathering in the morning. The syruping-off
usually took place at the end of the second day's boiling, when two or
three hundred pailfuls of sap had been reduced to four or five of syrup