86 MAPLE HONEY. 



heat, on the side which had been exposed to its rays. 

 The ten o'clock sun has the effect also of scorching the 

 yoiing trees, burning a stripe all the way down the stem, 

 and finally killing them. The preventive is to wind a 

 straw rope round the stem, and to let all the branches 

 grow till it has got a rough bark. It is an interesting 

 fact that part of a stem thus protected will thicken 

 faster than the uncovered portion, and, when the straw is 

 detached, will be sensibly of a greater girth. 



For those who are curious in such recipes, I may state 

 that Mr Heustie kills caterpillars on his apple-trees by 

 boring a hole half-way through the stem, filling with 

 sulphur, and plugging it with wood. The caterpillars 

 disappear, he says, in twenty-four hours. For lice and 

 other small vermin, he opens a piece of the bark, intro- 

 duces a few drops of turpentine, and then ties it up again. 

 Both remedies he pronounced to be infallible. 



I here first used maple sugar to my tea-dinner, 

 enjoyed the luxury of maple syrup or honey — which with 

 buckwheat cakes is really excellent — and ate broiled 

 salmon with apple-sauce. In the little garden were 

 water and musk melons, as well as cucumbers and 

 squashes, without any special treatment growing and 

 ripening, as if native to the spot. 



After leaving Mr Heustie's, and proceeding some 

 miles over a country stony still with granitic boulders, 

 and then over a patch of grey conglomerate — an outlier 

 of the great coal measures — we turned to the left, partly 

 to cut off a large bend of the river, and partly for the 

 purpose of passing through a cleared and cultivated tract, 

 known as the Scotch Settlement. Here there was much 

 cleared land of second-rate quality, but I felt it to be 

 impossible to form a satisfactory idea of its real agricul- 

 tural value. The drought had been so excessive that 

 every grass field was burned up and browned, as I had 

 seen them in Nova Scotia. It was so melancholy to 



