Page:Literary pilgrimages of a naturalist (IA literarypilgrima00packrich).pdf/222

 a week before. But the cold had shut down and the trees had quit. The morning before the thermometer had stood at zero and the sap in the pan was ice. So, no doubt, it was in the trees, and would be until the warmth had reached the heart of them. I learned more in the grove as the patient old horse drew the sled through a foot or two of old snow, and we gathered the crystal-clear sap from the buckets and poured it into the barrel, plodding from tree to tree. More still I got in the sugar house while the veteran fed the roaring fire and skimmed the scum from the boiling liquid as it flowed, an inch deep or so, along the winding channels, back and forth, sap at one end, syrup at the other.

The white men learned from the Indians the art of making maple sugar. In the "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society," published in 1684, we find the following: "The savages of Canada in the time that the sap rises in the maple make an incision in the tree by which it runs out. After they have evaporated eight pounds of the liquor there remains one pound as sweet and as much sugar as that which is got out of the canes.