MEMORIES OF THE 



filled from the earthen floor to the roof. The tubs were also 

 properly cleaned, nested and put under cover, and the sugar- 

 house fastened up until next year. 



In visiting the old sugar-bush with my brother John in July, 

 1899, we found the same store and gathering tubs in use which 

 father made and which we used fifty years ago, some of them 

 having been in constant use for seventy years. Many of the old 

 trees were yet alive. They looked like old friends and ac- 

 quaintances, and we greeted them with pleasure, recounting the 

 virtues or failings of each. The younger ones — those of forty 

 or fifty years' growth, which are now taking their places — 

 looked like strangers and interlopers, and we spent no time 

 talking to or of them. The old routes, which I could follow 

 with my eyes shut, were somewhat changed, and some apparently 

 abandoned. 



The impressions made on me by my early sugar-bush work 

 and experience were more permanent than anything else in the 

 line of farm work that happened in my earl}^ days. It was the 

 work that I liked above all other which I had to do. The 

 uncertainty of the thing helped to give it zest and interest, for it 

 was a kind of gambling guess as to what each day would bring 

 forth. It made a permanent impression which I have never 

 shaken. In my dreams I have boiled sap many a night, and 

 sometimes when wakeful, for want of some better occupation, 

 or in an attempt to court sleep, began with what we called the 

 middle route and gone around the sugar-bush to every tree, 

 thinking of the peculiarities of each, and followed the crooked, 

 rough roads over logs, through pitch-holes, swales and swamps, 

 through the hill route, the Pitkin route, the upper route, the 

 side-hill route, the hemlock-hill route, the swamp route, "Over 

 Jordan " and all the rest. I have counted the trees to see if 



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