don't care what you have found. I wouldn't shoot anything
to-day, unless the cupboard was bare and I was starvation hungry. In
that case I think a man comes first, and I'd kill a squirrel or quail
in season, but blest if I'd butcher a lot or do it often. Vegetables
and bread are better anyway. You peel easier even than the willow. What
jolly whistles father used to make!

"There was about twenty cents' worth of spice, and I'll easy raise it to
a dollar on this. I'll get a hundred gallons of syrup in the coming two
weeks and it will bring one fifty if I boil and strain it carefully and
can guarantee it contains no hickory bark and brown sugar. And it won't!
Straight for me or not at all. Pure is the word at Medicine Woods; syrup
or drugs it's the same thing. Between times I can fell every tree I'll
need for the new cabin, and average a dollar a day besides on spice,
alder, and willow, and twice that for sassafras for the Onabasha
markets; not to mention the quantities I can dry this year. Aside from
spring tea, they seem to use it for everything. I never yet have had
enough. It goes into half the tonics, anodyne, and stimulants; also soap
and candy. I see where I grow rich in spite of myself, and also where my
harvest is going to spoil before I can garner it, if I don't step
lively and double even more than I am now. Where the cabin is to come
in----well it must come if everything else goes.

"The roots can wait and I'll dig them next year and get more and larger
pieces. I won't really lose anything, and if she should come before I
am ready to start to find her, why then I'll have her home prepared.
How long before you begin your house, old fire-fly?" he inquired of a
flaming cardinal tilting on a twig.

He arose to make the round of the sap buckets again, then resumed his
work peeling bark, and so the time passed. In the following ten days he
collected and boiled enough sap to make more syrup than he had expected.
His earliest spring store of medicinal twigs, that were peeled to dry in
quills, were all collected and on the trays; he had digged several wagon
loads of sassafras and felled all the logs of stout, slender oak he
would require for his walls. Choice timber he had been curing for
candlestick material he hauled to the saw-mills to have cut properly,
for the thought of trying his hand at tables and chairs had taken
possession of him. He was sure he could make furniture that would appear
quite as well as the mis