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The baby, however, seemed highly content. Both his sticky fists clutched firmly a generous "chunk" of new maple-sugar, which he mumbled with his toothless gums, while his big eyes, widening like an owl's, stared about through the dusk with a placid intentness.
The contents of this sack would have furnished a modern industrial exhibition, provisions cooked and raw, blankets, maple-sugar, tinware, clothing, pork, Indian meal, flour, coffee, tea, &c. Phelps was the ideal guide: he knew every foot of the pathless forest; he knew all woodcraft, all the signs of the weather, or, what is the same thing, how to make a Delphic prediction about it.
He built a store for his sturdy pioneers, giving credit for their simple needs of life, and traded settlement products for them. His tenants put up log houses, and paid rent in butter, wheat, corn, oats, maple-sugar, and finally in pork; so much that rentals known as "pork leases" were sold like farms.
"The wife of Wau-bee-nee-mah, a chief from the Illinois River, was standing near, and, seeing my exhausted condition, she seized a kettle, dipped up some water from a stream that flowed near, threw into it some maple-sugar, and, stirring it up with her hand, gave it me to drink.
Besides their furs, various in kind and often of great value beaver, otter, marten, mink, silver-gray and red fox, wolf, bear, and wild-cat, musk-rat, and smoked deer-skins the Indians brought for trade maple-sugar in abundance, considerable quantities of both Indian corn and petit-blé, beans and the folles avoines, or wild rice; while the squaws added to their quota of merchandise a contribution in the form of moccasins, hunting-pouches, mococks, or little boxes of birch-bark embroidered with porcupine-quills and filled with maple-sugar, mats of a neat and durable fabric, and toy-models of Indian cradles, snow-shoes, canoes, etc., etc.
Never were there such potatoes, never beans that seemed to have more of the bean in them, never such curly pork, never trout with more Indian-meal on them, never mutton more distinctly sheepy; and the tea, drunk out of a tin cup, with a lump of maple-sugar dissolved in it, it is the sort of tea that takes hold, lifts the hair, and disposes the drinker to anecdote and hilariousness.
Then Baby smiled again, but did not budge. And the Master spake sweetly and made his voice like that of the summer bird, but it was of no avail, for Wasis sat still and sucked his maple-sugar. Then the Master frowned and spoke terribly, and ordered Wasis to come crawling to him immediately. And Baby burst out into crying and yelling, but did not move for all that.
Pretty soon Cuffy slipped from behind the tree and scampered as fast as he could run to the door of the sugar-house for that was what he had found. He stuck his head inside and oh, joy! there was no one there. Just inside the door stood a tub full of something brown. One sniff told Cuffy that it was maple-sugar and he began to gulp great mouthfuls of it. Yes! his father was right.
The younger brother had prepared a cool drink, sweet with maple-sugar, fragrant with herbs, and in it was the powder of the horn of the Weewillmekq'. The witch, warm and very thirsty from dancing, came to the door. He offered her the cup. Without heeding who gave it, she drank it dry, and, turning to her partner, went on in the dance. And then a strange thing happened.
The farmers of the United States, who make maple-sugar, also use these troughs as they will often have several hundred trees running at the same time, and it would be rather expensive for a backwoodsman to supply himself with so many vessels from either the potter, the tinman, or the cooper.
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