the swamp,
ever so many times, after you had gone to sleep last night. Didn't
think he'd come up so near the fire, though. But we both got to sleep
a little while after midnight. I suppose he must have _lushed_ up the
sirup then."

"Tremendous fellow, too," said Sam. "Look at those tracks!"

Tracks indeed! There in the snow about the kettle were his broad, deep
footmarks, long as a man's boot, and much wider, pressed down, too,
into the snow, as only great weight could have pressed.

"Gracious!" exclaimed I, "you wouldn't have caught me going to sleep
here if I had known there was such a monster as that round!"

"Rather lucky, I think," said Zeke, "that he didn't take it into his
head to _top off_ his sirup with some of us."

"And I'm mad, too," continued Zeke. "We were depending on this kittle
of sirup for our party to-night."

"Your party?"

"Yes; we've invited a lot of the boys--and girls, too--to come up here
this evening, to make 'sheep-skins.' You'll stay--won't you? We were
going to ask you."

"Don't know," said I, still thinking of the bear.

"O, I don't think he'll meddle with us," said Sam, guessing at my
hesitation. "I'm going down to get some _fixins_, and shall bring up a
gun. If he calls again, he may get a dose of buckshot."

No one is apt to be a great coward after the sun is up. Thus
reassured, I concluded to stop to the party, for which the boys were
intending to make a great preparation.

"Let's do the thing up in style now," said Sam.

We went at it. First we cut low, shrubby evergreens, hemlocks mostly,
and with these made a sort of enclosure, some four rods in diameter,
around the kettles, by planting them in the snow. Then clipping off an
immense quantity of smaller boughs, we strewed the snow inside the
enclosure with these. We thus had a sort of green room (without any
roof), in the centre of which steamed the boiling kettles; and at the
entrance, or doorway, we made a grand arch of cedar. For seats we
rolled in "four-foot" cuts from the trunk of a large poplar they had
lately felled, first splitting off a slab from the side of each to
form a seat, which we cushioned with cedar.

Meanwhile another kettle of sirup was boiling down to supply the place
of that the bear had drank; and filling some fifteen or twenty
sap-buckets with clean snow, crowded down hard to make the
"sheep-skins" on, we were ready for our company.

It was nearly night before all this had been completed. Sam