d taken refuge, and sucked
his stolen goods at ease. Similar raids harassed the long line of cooling
tins, and not all the efforts of the sugar-makers at mounting guard
could protect them, until the guerilla corps of youngsters became in
some degree surfeited, and slid away through the woods as they had come.
Meanwhile, the best part of a stone of the manufacture had vanished.

'Them are spry chaps, I reckon,' was the parent's reflection, with some
pride in their successful free-booting, though he had opposed its
details.

'I would teach them to be honest, Mr. Bunting;' which speech only evoked
a laugh.

'Now I guess you're riled 'cos they ran away with yer sugar, jest as ef
'twarn't more mine than yourn.'

This was unpromising as portended the division into shares, wherein
Robert was overreached, as he knew he should be; but he comforted
himself by the reflection that next year he should be able to do without
his odious assistant, and that for this summer he had housekeeping-sugar
enough. He utterly refused to enter into any coalition for the making of
vinegar or beer. Towards the close of the sap season he tapped a yellow
birch, by his Scotch neighbour's advice, drew from it thirty gallons in
three days, boiled down that quantity into ten gallons, and set it to
ferment in a sunny place, with a little potato yeast as the exciting
cause. Of course the result was immensely too much vinegar for any
possible household needs, considering that not even a cucumber bed
was as yet laid out in the embryo garden.

But now April, 'the moon for breaking the snow-shoes,' in Ojibbeway
parlance, was advancing; patches of brown ground began to appear under
the hot sunlight, oozy and sloppy until the two-feet depth of frost was
gradually exhaled. The dwellers in the shanty had almost forgotten the
look of the world in colours, for so many months had it slept in white
array. Robert could have kissed the earliest knot of red and blue
hepaticas which bloomed at the base of a log-heap. But he looked
in vain for that eldest child of an English spring, 'the wee modest
crimson-tipped' daisy, or for the meek nestling primrose among the
moss. And from the heaven's blue lift no music of larks poured down;
no twitter of the chaffinch or whistle of the thrush echoed from the
greening woods. Robert thought the blue-bird's voice a poor apology for
his native songsters.

He had, indeed, little time for any reflections unconnected with hard
wor