the stately maples are tapped as the sap begins to stir, and be-ringed
with absurd little buckets (a cow being milked into a thimble gives some
idea of the disproportion), which are emptied into cauldrons.
Afterwards (this is the time of the 'sugaring-off parties') you pour the
boiled syrup into tins full of fresh snow, where it hardens, and you
pretend to help and become very sticky and make love, boys and girls
together. Even the introduction of patent sugar evaporators has not
spoiled the love-making.

There is a certain scarcity of men to make love with; not so much in
towns which have their own manufactories and lie within a lover's
Sabbath-day journey of New York, but in the farms and villages. The men
have gone away--the young men are fighting fortune further West, and the
women remain--remain for ever as women must. On the farms, when the
children depart, the old man and the old woman strive to hold things
together without help, and the woman's portion is work and monotony.
Sometimes she goes mad to an extent which appreciably affects statistics
and is put down in census reports. More often, let us hope, she dies. In
the villages where the necessity for heavy work is not so urgent the
women find consolation in the formation of literary clubs and circles,
and so gather to themselves a great deal of wisdom in their own way.
That way is not altogether lovely. They desire facts and the knowledge
that they are at a certain page in a German or an Italian book before a
certain time, or that they have read the proper books in a proper way.
At any rate, they have something to do that seems as if they were doing
something. It has been said that the New England stories are cramped
and narrow. Even a far-off view of the iron-bound life whence they are
drawn justifies the author. You can carve a nut in a thousand different
ways by reason of the hardness of the shell.