34 EVERYDAY ADVENTURES 
sweet as honey and without a trace of pucker. On 
their way back, they passed through a thicket of 
tangled bushes, whose branches were all matted to- 
gether in bunches which looked like birds’ nests. 
The twigs were laden down with round, purple berries 
about the size of a wild cherry, and the Captain told 
the Band that these were hackberries, otherwise 
known as sugar-berries. They picked handfuls of 
them, and found that the berry had a sweet spicy 
pulp over a fragile stone that could be crushed like 
the stones of a raisin, while the fruit when eaten 
resembled a raisin in taste. 
Hurrying back to the camp-fire tree, the Captain 
dug a round circle a couple of feet in diameter in the 
snow, and spread down a layer of dry leaves. Over 
these he built a little tepee of tiny, dry, black-oak 
twigs. Underneath this he placed a fragment of 
birch-bark which he had peeled off one of the aspen 
birches which grew on the fringe of the swamp. 
This burned like paper, and in a minute the little 
ball of dry twigs was crackling away with a steady 
flame. Over this he piled dry sassafras and hickory 
boughs, and in a few moments the Band was seated 
around a column of flame which roared up fully four 
feet high. With their backs against the great oak tree, 
they cracked and cracked and cracked black wal- 
nuts and crunched sugar-berries and nibbled nanny- 
plums and tasted frost-grapes—saving the single 
sandwich until next to the last; while for desert they 
had handfuls and handfuls of honey-sweet, wrinkled 
persimmons. 
