syrup down to the house, where the liquid was strained while still
hot. The reduction of it to sugar was done upon the kitchen stove,
from three hundred to five hundred pounds being about the average
annual yield.

The bright warm days at the boiling-place I love best to remember;
the robins running about over the bare ground or caroling from the
treetops, the nuthatches calling, the crows walking about the brown
fields, the bluebirds flitting here and there, the cows lowing or
restless in the barnyard.


When I think of the storied lands across the Atlantic,--England,
France, Germany, Italy, so rich in historical associations, steeped
in legend and poetry, the very look of the fields redolent of the
past,--and then turn to my own native hills, how poor and barren
they seem!--not one touch anywhere of that which makes the charm
of the Old World--no architecture, no great names; in fact, no
past. They look naked and prosy, yet how I love them and cling
to them! They are written over with the lives of the first
settlers that cleared the fields and built the stone walls--simple,
common-place lives, worthy and interesting, but without the appeal
of heroism or adventure.

The land here is old, geologically, dating back to the Devonian Age,
the soil in many places of decomposed old red sandstone; but it is
new in human history, having been settled only about one hundred
and fifty years.

Time has worn down the hills and mountains so that all the outlines