Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/352

 328 FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS. [1856,

know. It matters not how little juice you get, if you get all you can, and boil it down. I made just one crystal of sugar once, one twentieth of an inch cube, out of a pumpkin, and it suf ficed. Though the yield be no greater than that, this is not less the season for it, and it will be not the less sweet, nay, it will be infinitely the sweeter.

Shall, then, the maple yield sugar, and not man ? Shall the farmer be thus active, and surely have so much sugar to show for it, before this very March is gone, while I read the newspa per ? &quot;While he works in his sugar-camp let me work in mine, for sweetness is in me, and to sugar it shall come, it shall not all go to leaves and wood. Am I not a sugar-maple man, then ? Boil down the sweet sap which the spring causes to flow within you. Stop not at syrup, go on to sugar, though you present the world with but a single crystal, a crystal not made from trees in your yard, but from the new life that stirs in your pores. Cheerfully skim your kettle, and watch it set and crystallize, making a holi day of it if you will. Heaven will be propitious to you as to him.

Say to the farmer, There is your crop ; here is mine. Mine is a sugar to sweeten sugar with. If you will listen to me, I will sweeten your whole load, your whole life.