owns for the
heads of squirrels. County treasuries were exhausted by these premiums.
The Swedish traveller, Kalm, said that in Pennsylvania in one year,
1749, L8000 was paid out for heads of black and gray squirrels, at
threepence a head, which would show that over six hundred thousand were
killed.

From the woods came a sweet food-store, one specially grateful when
sugar was so scarce and so high-priced,--wild honey, which the colonists
eagerly gathered everywhere from hollow tree-trunks. Curiously enough,
the traveller, Kalm, insisted that bees were not native in America, but
were brought over by the English; that the Indians had no name for them
and called them English flies.

Governor Berkeley of Virginia, writing in 1706, called the maple the
sugar-tree; he said:--

"The Sugar-Tree yields a kind of Sap or Juice which by boiling is
made into Sugar. This Juice is drawn out, by wounding the Trunk of
the Tree, and placing a Receiver under the Wound. It is said that
the Indians make one Pound of Sugar out of eight Pounds of the
Liquor. It is bright and moist with a full large Grain, the
Sweetness of it being like that of good Muscovada."

The sugar-making season was ever hailed with delight by the boys of the
household in colonial days, who found in this work in the woods a
wonderful outlet for the love of wild life which was strong in them. It
had in truth a touch of going a-gypsying, if any work as hard as
sugaring-off could have anything common with gypsy life. The maple-trees
were tapped as soon as the sap began to run in the trunk and showed at
the end of the twigs; this was in late winter if mild, or in the
earliest spring. A notch was cut in the trunk of the tree at a
convenient height from the ground, usually four or five feet, and the
running sap was guided by setting in the notch a semicircular basswood
spout cut and set with a special tool called a tapping-gauge. In earlier
days the trees were "boxed," that is, a great gash cut across the side
and scooped out and down to gather the sap. This often proved fatal to
the trees, and was abandoned. A trough, usually made of a butternut log
about three feet long, was dug out, Indian fashion, and placed under the
end of the spout. These troughs were made deep enough to hold about ten
quarts. In later years a hole was bored in the tree with an augur; and
sap-buckets were used instead of troughs.

Sometimes these troughs were left in