THE GIFT OF TONGUES IN TREES. 



67 



in spring — and the springs were milder then — the 

 young and old gathered for all imaginable frolic. 

 The boiling-down was done in the woods, and no 

 one missed the logs and limbs that were burned 

 under the great ten-pail iron kettles. At night the 

 boys went to the bush to keep up the boiling till 

 midnight. Somehow on those days few hen's-eggs 

 reached the house, and nutcakes and mince-pies 

 vanished from the pantries and apples from the 

 cellars. The time came, however, when maple- 

 trees were more scarce, and 



now it hardly pays the farmer 

 to tap what few trees he has 

 left. The sugar-maples seen 

 in the sketch (page 69) are a 

 delightful group, too valuable 

 for their beauty to be bored. 

 The time has nearly or quite 

 come in which to plant sugar- 

 orchards as we plant apple- 

 orchards. The manufacture 

 of maple-sugar will become a 

 great and profitable business. 



All along the Oriskany val- 

 ley, which runs northward 

 through New York, there are 

 glens that formerly poured in 

 their contributions to the 

 flood. The solid ridge 1,000 

 feet above the level was carved 

 through by the contributory 

 springs, and down and down, 

 until the bed-rock is some- 

 times of the Niagara group 

 and sometimes of the Salina. 

 These glens are now exquisite- 

 ly beautiful, and some of them 

 wooded in wildness along their 

 abrupt or easy slopes, while 

 only a whispering rill goes 

 under the ferns and over the 

 shales down to the meadow- 

 life and the sun. Not one of 

 them is more picturesque or 

 woody than Kirkland Glen. 

 The far-sloping and yet rugged 

 and complex banks have kept 

 back the farmer and his plow 

 on both sides. There the 

 squirrel is yet in happy rela- 

 tion to sylvan homes, and the 

 bees have on rocky cliffs a few 



trees that it will not pay to climb and cut. The brook 

 has some delicious secrets it has never told to many, 



and, I dare say, not a few tiny trout may be sup- 

 posed to exist in the shaded pools. Blackberries 

 fit for a feast of the gods used to grow thereabout, 

 in great abundance, putting to shame, prospect- 

 ively, the scarcity that should prevail in the 

 region in later years when man had left there the 

 marks of his energy in destroying nature's work. 

 Thimbleberries, too, opened their great white blos- 

 soms, wooing the bees on the steepest bluffs. It is a 

 glen of rare beauty. There remains much to charm 



LoMBARDY Poplars, Planted in 1806 on College Hill, Clinton, N. Y. 



the eye, although the depredations of man have 

 impaired its picturesqueness. E. P. Powell. 



