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We know that the heavier salt sea-water buoys us up more than the fresh river or pond water, but we do not feel in the same way the lift of the high barometric wave. Even the rough, tough-coated maple-trees in spring are quickly susceptible to these atmospheric changes. The farmer knows that he needs sunshine and crisp air to make maple-sugar as well as to make hay.

Joy had a remarkably vague idea of what she was going to do, but she felt unusually good-natured, as who could help feeling, with such a sunlight as that and such distant glories of the maple-trees, and such shadows melting on the mountains! "I want to go chestnotting, too-o-o!" called Winnie, disconsolate, in the doorway.

Perhaps the boy has been out digging into the maple-trees with his jack-knife; at any rate, he is pretty sure to announce the discovery as he comes running into the house in a great state of excitement as if he had heard a hen cackle in the barn with "Sap's runnin'!" And then, indeed, the stir and excitement begin.

"Why, yes, don't you know that's the way they make maple sugar? In the spring, about April, when the sap begins to run up into the maple-trees, and often while the snow is still on the ground, they what they call tap the tree; they drive a sort of little spout right into the tree and soon the sap begins to ooze out and drop into buckets that are placed to catch it.

His mind was seeing a little house with dormer-windows, and a steep roof on which the snow could not lodge in winter-time; with a narrow stoop in front where one could rest of an evening, the day's work done; the stone-and-earth oven near by in the open, where the bread for a family of twenty was baked; the wooden plough tipped against the fence, to wait the "fall" cultivation; the big iron cooler in which the sap from the maple-trees was boiled, in the days when the snow thawed and spring opened the heart of the wood; the flash of the sickle and the scythe hard by; the fields of the little, narrow farm running back from the St.

"Midget, your curiosity will some day get you into trouble. I prefer to do the work in the meadow. Perhaps it is sewing, and I shall take my work-basket and sit under the big maple-trees to sew." Marjorie laughed to think of Uncle Steve sewing, but was really burning with curiosity to know what he was going to do. However, she had given her word, and she conscientiously kept it.

Behind the oak was a luxuriant thicket of hazel with dark sheenless leaves, which were so dense, that neither trunk nor branches could be seen. Above the hazel rose two straight, joyous maple-trees with gayly indented leaves, red stems and long dangling clusters of green fruit. Behind the maples came the forest a green evenly rounded slope, where birds went out and in as elves in a grasshill.

It begin, 'Oft in the stilly night' like that." Charley stiffened. It was the song Kathleen sang for him the night they became engaged. "It is a good voice-that. I see her face, for there is a candle on the piano. I come close and closter to the house. There is big maple-trees I am well hid. A man is beside her. He lean hover her an' put his hand on her shoulder. 'Sing it again, Kat'leen, he say.

Slight and indefinable touches in the scene, perhaps the mere absence of the tiny human figures passing along the road or labouring in the distant meadows, perhaps the blue curls of smoke rising lazily from the farmhouse chimneys, or the family groups sitting under the maple-trees before the door, diffused a sabbath atmosphere over the world.

Often their plans were not carried out, and often they were, but nobody cared much which way it happened. Sometimes Stella sat alone on the little porch, reading. This would usually be when Molly and Midge were climbing high up into the branches of the old maple-trees.