In the great kettles the boiling goes on slowly, and the liquid, as it thickens, is dipped from one to another, until in the end kettle it is reduced to sirup, and is taken out to cool and settle, until enough is made to "sugar off." To "sugar off" is to boil the sirup until it is thick enough to crystallize into sugar.This is the grand event, and is done only once in two or three days.
But the boy's desire is to "sugar off" perpetually.He boils his kettle down as rapidly as possible; he is not particular about chips, scum, or ashes; he is apt to burn his sugar; but if he can get enough to make a little wax on the snow, or to scrape from the bottom of the kettle with his wooden paddle, he is happy.A good deal is wasted on his hands, and the outside of his face, and on his clothes, but he does not care; he is not stingy.
To watch the operations of the big fire gives him constant pleasure.
Sometimes he is left to watch the boiling kettles, with a piece of pork tied on the end of a stick, which he dips into the boiling mass when it threatens to go over.He is constantly tasting of it, however, to see if it is not almost sirup.He has a long round stick, whittled smooth at one end, which he uses for this purpose, at the constant risk of burning his tongue.The smoke blows in his face; he is grimy with ashes; he is altogether such a mass of dirt, stickiness, and sweetness, that his own mother would n't know him.
He likes to boil eggs in the hot sap with the hired man; he likes to roast potatoes in the ashes, and he would live in the camp day and night if he were permitted.Some of the hired men sleep in the bough shanty and keep the fire blazing all night.To sleep there with them, and awake in the night and hear the wind in the trees, and see the sparks fly up to the sky, is a perfect realization of all the stories of adventures he has ever read.He tells the other boys afterwards that he heard something in the night that sounded very much like a bear.The hired man says that he was very much scared by the hooting of an owl.
The great occasions for the boy, though, are the times of "sugaring-off." Sometimes this used to be done in the evening, and it was made the excuse for a frolic in the camp.The neighbors were invited;sometimes even the pretty girls from the village, who filled all the woods with their sweet voices and merry laughter and little affectations of fright.The white snow still lies on all the ground except the warm spot about the camp.The tree branches all show distinctly in the light of the fire, which sends its ruddy glare far into the darkness, and lights up the bough shanty, the hogsheads, the buckets on the trees, and the group about the boiling kettles, until the scene is like something taken out of a fairy play.If Rembrandt could have seen a sugar party in a New England wood, he would have made out of its strong contrasts of light and shade one of the finest pictures in the world.But Rembrandt was not born in Massachusetts;people hardly ever do know where to be born until it is too late.
Being born in the right place is a thing that has been very much neglected.
At these sugar parties every one was expected to eat as much sugar as possible; and those who are practiced in it can eat a great deal.It is a peculiarity about eating warm maple sugar, that though you may eat so much of it one day as to be sick and loathe the thought of it, you will want it the next day more than ever.At the "sugaring-off "they used to pour the hot sugar upon the snow, where it congealed, without crystallizing, into a sort of wax, which I do suppose is the most delicious substance that was ever invented.And it takes a great while to eat it.If one should close his teeth firmly on a ball of it, he would be unable to open his mouth until it dissolved.
The sensation while it is melting is very pleasant, but one cannot converse.
The boy used to make a big lump of it and give it to the dog, who seized it with great avidity, and closed his jaws on it, as dogs will on anything.It was funny the next moment to see the expression of perfect surprise on the dog's face when he found that he could not open his jaws.He shook his head; he sat down in despair; he ran round in a circle; he dashed into the woods and back again.He did everything except climb a tree, and howl.It would have been such a relief to him if he could have howled.But that was the one thing he could not do.
XV
THE HEART OF NEW ENGLAND
It is a wonder that every New England boy does not turn out a poet, or a missionary, or a peddler.Most of them used to.There is everything in the heart of the New England hills to feed the imagination of the boy, and excite his longing for strange countries.
I scarcely know what the subtle influence is that forms him and attracts him in the most fascinating and aromatic of all lands, and yet urges him away from all the sweet delights of his home to become a roamer in literature and in the world, a poet and a wanderer.
There is something in the soil and the pure air, I suspect, that promises more romance than is forthcoming, that excites the imagination without satisfying it, and begets the desire of adventure.And the prosaic life of the sweet home does not at all correspond to the boy's dreams of the world.In the good old days, Iam told, the boys on the coast ran away and became sailors; the countryboys waited till they grew big enough to be missionaries, and then they sailed away, and met the coast boys in foreign ports.
