Father and Brother Hiram did the tapping, using an
axe to cut the gash in the tree, and to drive in the gouge below it
to make a place for the spile, while one of my younger brothers and
I carried the pans and placed them in position.
It was always a glad time with me; the early birds were singing and
calling, the snowbanks were melting, the fields were getting bare,
the roads drying, and spring tokens were on every hand. We gathered
the sap by hand in those days, two pails and a neck-yoke. It was
sturdy work. We would usually begin about three or four o'clock,
and by five have the one hundred and fifty pailfuls of sap in the
hogsheads. When the sap ran all night, we would begin the gathering
in the morning. The syruping-off usually took place at the end of
the second day's boiling, when two or three hundred pailfuls of sap
had been reduced to four or five of syrup. In the March or April
twilight, or maybe after dark, we would carry those heavy pails of
syrup down to the house, where the liquid was strained while still
hot. The reduction of it to sugar was done upon the kitchen stove,
from three hundred to five hundred pounds being about the average
annual yield.
The bright warm days at the boiling-place I love best to remember;
the robins running about over the bare ground or caroling from the
treetops, the nuthatches calling, the crows walking about the brown
fields, the bluebirds flitting here and there, the cows lowing or
restless in the barnyard.
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