Page:Ralph Connor - The man from Glengarry.djvu/84

  "And I have never seen the tapping of a tree. I believe I shall learn just now, if Ranald will only show me, from the very beginning."

Her eager interest in his work won Ranald from his reserve. "There is not much to see," he said, apologetically. "You just cut a natch in the tree, and drive in the spile, and—"

"Oh, but wait," she cried. "That's just what I wanted to see. How do you make the spile?"

"Oh, that is easy," said Ranald. He took up a slightly concave chisel or gouge, and slit a slim slab from off a block of cedar about a foot long.

"This is a spile," he exclaimed. "We drive it into the tree, and the sap runs down into the trough, you see."

"No, I don't see," said the minister's wife. She was too thoroughgoing to do things by halves. "How do you drive this into the tree, and how do you get the sap to run down it?"

"I will show you," he said, and taking with him a gouge and ax, he approached a maple still untapped. "You first make a gash like this." So saying, with two or three blows of his ax, he made a slanting gouge in the tree. "And then you make a place for the spile this way." With the back of his ax he drove his gouge into the corner of the notch, and then fitted his spile into the incision so made.

"Ah, now I see. And you put the trough under the drip from the spile. But how do you make the troughs?"