the day fully balances the frost of the night. In New York and New
England, the time of the sap hovers about the vernal equinox,
beginning a week or ten days before, and continuing a week or ten
days after. As the days and nights get equal, the heat and cold get
equal, and the sap mounts. A day that brings the bees out of the
hive will bring the sap out of the maple-tree. It is the fruit of
the equal marriage of the sun and the frost. When the frost is all
out of the ground, and all the snow gone from its surface, the flow
stops. The thermometer must not rise above 38° or 40° by day, or
sink below 24° or 25° at night, with wind in the northwest; a
relaxing south wind, and the run is over for the present. Sugar
weather is crisp weather. How the tin buckets glisten in the gray
woods; how the robins laugh; how the nuthatches call; how lightly
the thin blue smoke rises among the trees! The squirrels are out of
their dens; the migrating water-fowls are streaming northward; the
sheep and cattle look wistfully toward the bare fields; the tide of
the season, in fact, is just beginning to rise.

Sap-letting does not seem to be an exhaustive process to the trees,
as the trees of a sugar-bush appear to be as thrifty and as
long-lived as other trees. They come to have a maternal,
large-waisted look, from the wounds of the axe or the auger, and
that is about all.

In my sugar-making days, the sap was carried to the boiling-place in
pails by the aid of a neck-yoke and stored in hogsheads, and boiled
or evaporated in immense kettles or caldrons set in huge stone
arches; now, the hogshead goes to the trees hauled upon a sled by a
team, and the sap is evaporated in broad, shallow, sheet-iron
pans,--a great saving of fuel and of labor.