A NEW ENGLAND WOODPILE 



of the woods with trim-built sugar-houses 

 and patent evaporators, the sap drips 

 with resounding metallic tinkle into pails 

 of shining tin. Now the old maple has 

 come to perform its last office, of warm- 

 ing and cooking the food for a genera- 

 tion that was unborn when it was yet a 

 lusty tree. 



Beside it lies a great wild-cherry tree 

 that somehow escaped the cabinet maker 

 when there was one in every town and 

 cherry wood was in fashion. Its fruit 

 mollified the harshness of the New Eng- 

 land rum of many an old-time raising and 

 husking. Next is a yellow birch with a 

 shaggy mane of rustling bark along its 

 whole length, like a twelve-foot piece of 

 the sea serpent drifted ashore and hauled 

 inland ; then a white birch, no longer 

 white, but gray with a coating of moss, 

 and black with belts of old peelings, 

 made for the patching of canoes and 

 roofing of shanties. 



With these lies a black birch, whose 

 once smooth bark age has scaled and fur- 

 rowed, and robbed of all its tenderness 

 and most of its pungent, aromatic flavor. 

 Some of it yet lingers in the younger top- 

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