nside to make the grain closer: I've heerd
tell on that dodge. If you warn't so far from the "Corner," we could fix
our sugar together, an' make but one bilin' of it, for you'll want a
team, an' you don't know nothin' about maples.' Zack's eyes were askance
upon Robert. 'We might 'most as well go shares--you give the sap, an' I
the labour,' he added. 'I'll jest bring up the potash kettle on the sled
a Monday, an' we'll spill the trees. You cut a hundred little spouts
like this: an' have you an auger? There now, I guess that's fixed.'

But he turned back after a few yards to say--'Since yer hand's in, you
'most might jest as well fix a score troughs for me, in case some o'
mine are leaked:' and away he went.

'That old sharper will be sure to have the best of the bargain,' thought
Robert. 'It's just his knowledge pitted against my inexperience. One
satisfaction is that I am learning every day.' And he went on with his
troughs and spouts until near sundown, when he and Arthur went to look
at the Indian encampment, and see what progress was being made there.

'I can't imagine,' said the latter, 'why the tree which produces only a
watery juice in Europe should produce a diluted syrup in Canada.'

'Holt said something of the heat of the March sun setting the sap in
motion, and making it sweet. You feel how burning the noon is, these
days.'

'That's a statement of a fact, but not an explanation,' said the
cavilling Arthur. 'Why should a hot sun put sugar in the sap?'

Robert had no answer, nor has philosophy either.

The Indians had already tapped their trees, and placed underneath each
orifice a sort of rough bowl, for catching the precious juice as it
trickled along a stick inserted to guide its flow. These bowls, made of
the semicircular excrescences on a species of maple, serve various uses
in the cooking line, in a squaw's menage, along with basins and boxes of
the universally useful birchen bark. When the sap has been boiled down
into syrup, and clarified, it is again transferred to them to
crystallize, and become solid in their keeping.

An Indian girl was making what is called gum-sugar, near the kettles:
cutting moulds of various shapes in the snow, and dropping therein small
quantities of the boiling molasses, which cooled rapidly into a tough
yellowish substance, which could be drawn out with the fingers like
toffy. Arthur much approved of the specimen he tasted; and without doubt
the sugar-making was a swe