was fourteen or fifteen I took a hand in this part of the work. It used
to tax my strength to carry the two twelve-quart pails full through the
rough places and up the steep banks in the woods and then lift them up
and alternately empty them into the hogsheads without displacing the
neck yoke. But I could do it. Now all this work is done by the aid of a
team and a pipe fastened on a sled. Before I was old enough to gather
sap it fell to me to go to the barns and put in hay for the cows and
help stable them. The next morning the boiling of the sap would begin,
with Hiram in charge. The big deep iron kettles were slow evaporators
compared with the broad shallow sheet-iron pans now in use. Profundity
cannot keep up with shallowness in sugar-making, the more superficial
your evaporator, within limits, the more rapid your progress. It took
the farmers nearly a hundred years to find this out, or at least to act
upon it.

At the end of a couple of days of hard boiling Hiram would "syrup off,"
having reduced two hundred pails of sap to five or six of syrup. The
syruping-off often occurred after dark. When the liquid dropped from a
dipper which was dipped into it and, held up in the cool air, formed
into stiff thin masses, it had reached the stage of syrup. How we minded
our steps over the rough path, in the semi-darkness of the old tin
lantern, in carrying those precious pails of syrup to the house, where
the final process of "sugaring off" was to be completed by Mother and
Jane!

The sap runs came at intervals of several days. Two or three days would
usually end one run. A change in the weather to below freezing would
stop the flow, and a change to much warmer would check it.

The fountains of sap are let loose by frosty sunshine. Frost in the