en could be applied to some
industry, we should see wonderful results. But a boy is like a
galvanic battery that is not in connection with anything; he generates
electricity and plays it off into the air with the most reckless
prodigality. And I, for one, would n't have it otherwise. It is as much
a boy's business to play off his energies into space as it is for a
flower to blow, or a catbird to sing snatches of the tunes of all the
other birds.

In my day maple-sugar-making used to be something between picnicking and
being shipwrecked on a fertile island, where one should save from the
wreck tubs and augers, and great kettles and pork, and hen's eggs and
rye-and-indian bread, and begin at once to lead the sweetest life in the
world. I am told that it is something different nowadays, and that there
is more desire to save the sap, and make good, pure sugar, and sell
it for a large price, than there used to be, and that the old fun and
picturesqueness of the business are pretty much gone. I am told that it
is the custom to carefully collect the sap and bring it to the house,
where there are built brick arches, over which it is evaporated in
shallow pans, and that pains is taken to keep the leaves, sticks, and
ashes and coals out of it, and that the sugar is clarified; and that, in
short, it is a money-making business, in which there is very little fun,
and that the boy is not allowed to dip his paddle into the kettle of
boiling sugar and lick off the delicious sirup. The prohibition may
improve the sugar, but it is cruel to the boy.

As I remember the New England boy (and I am very intimate with one), he
used to be on the qui vive in the spring for the sap to begin running.
I think he discovered it as soon as anybody. Perhaps he knew it by a
feeling of something starting in his own veins,--a sort of spring stir
in his legs and arms, which tempted him to stand on his head, or throw
a handspring, if he could find a spot of ground from which the snow
had melted. The sap stirs early in the legs of a country-boy, and shows
itself in uneasiness in the toes, which get tired of boots, and want
to come out and touch the soil just as soon as the sun has warmed it
a little. The country-boy goes barefoot just as naturally as the trees
burst their buds, which were packed and varnished over in the fall to
keep the water and the frost out. Perhaps the boy has been out digging
into the maple-trees with his jack-knife; at any rate, he is