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These still, hazy, brooding mid-April mornings, when the farmer first starts afield with his plow, when his boys gather the buckets in the sugar-bush, when the high-hole calls long and loud through the hazy distance, when the meadowlark sends up her clear, silvery shaft of sound from the meadow, when the bush sparrow trills in the orchard, when the soft maples look red against the wood, or their fallen bloom flecks the drying mud in the road, such mornings are about the most exciting and suggestive of the whole year.
"How many passengers is it to accommodate, my dear." "Don't teaze, ma belle. I am only making a model. My canoe will be made out of a big pine log, and large enough to hold three." "Is it to be like the big sap-trough in the sugar-bush at home?" Louis nodded assent.
On hard-wood ridges every sugar-bush ran sap; the aroma from fire and kettle sweetened the air; a few battered, hibernating butterflies crawled out of cracks and crannies and sat on the sap-pans sunning their scarlet-banded wings. And out of the hot South into the fading silver of this chill Northern forest-world came Hamil, sunburned, sombre-eyed, silent.
"Ah, if we had but a good cake of maple sugar, now, to preserve our grapes with, and make such grape jelly as my mother makes!" said Louis. "If we find out a sugar-bush we will manage to make plenty of sugar," said Catharine; "there are maples not two hundred yards from the shanty, near the side of the steep bank to the east.
I have in my mind now a "sugar-bush" nestled in the lap of a spur of the Catskills, every tree of which is known to me, and assumes a distinct individuality in my thought. I know the look and quality of the whole two hundred; and when on my annual visit to the old homestead I find one has perished, or fallen before the axe, I feel a personal loss.
The blaze from the sugar-bush gleams red; Far down in the forest dark, A ruddy glow on the trees is shed, That lights up their rugged bark; And with merry shout, The busy rout Watch the sap as it bubbles high; And they talk of the cheer Of the coming year, And the jest and the song pass by; And brave tales of old Round the fire are told, That kindle youth's beaming eye. Hurrah!
They had to pull down some of the shed before they could put the fire out; but such trifling events were too common in the bush to disturb their tempers, and they were thankful that matters were no worse. Just before this, a neighbour's cow had got into his sugar-bush and drank so much cold molasses that she burst and died.
It is to be expected, therefore, that "yellow-hammer" will respond to the general tendency, and contribute his part to the spring chorus. His April call is his finest touch, his most musical expression. I recall an ancient maple standing sentry to a large sugar-bush, that, year after year, afforded protection to a brood of yellow-hammers in its decayed heart.
I wouldnt deceive you or any man and to my drinking its about the best molasses that come out of a sugar-bush. Mr. Le Quoi has offered you ten pence, said young Edwards. The manufacturer stared at the speaker with an air of great freedom, but made no reply. Oui, said the Frenchman, ten penny. Jevausraner cie, monsieur: ah! mon Anglois! je l'oublie toujours.
The elegant residences of the owners were romantically situated on some half-isolated promonotory around which the stream sweeps, embowered with maples and begirt with willows at its base; or nestled away in some nook, moss-lined and hemlock-shaded, which marks where some spring brook bubbles down its brief career to the larger stream; or in some plateau upon the other side, backed by a scraggly old orchard, and hidden among great groves of rock-maples which the careful husbandman spared a hundred years ago for a "sugar-bush," little dreaming that the nabobs of the rushing streams would build homesteads beneath their shade.
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