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Nowadays, we get sugar from cane and beet-root in abundance, while sugar-maples and palm-trees of various sorts afford a considerable supply to remoter countries. But the childhood of the little Greeks and Romans must have been absolutely unlighted by a single ray of joy from chocolate creams or Everton toffee.

The land flows with milk and honey, he says, clear water and miles of clover and sweet grass, enough to feed all the herds of Basham, and mighty forests with trees that thick ye could cut a hole in their trunks and drive a waggon through, and sugar-maples and plums and cherries like you won't see in no set orchard, and black soil fair crying for crops.

To add to our other troubles at the old Squire's that fall, our twelve Jersey cows began giving bitter milk, so bitter that the cream was affected and the butter rendered unusable. Yet the pasture was an excellent one, consisting of sweet uplands, fringed round with sugar-maples, oaks and beeches, where the cleared land extended up the hillsides into the borders of the great woods.

I taught her to fish and shoot, and often she'd stay out in camp with me all night when I was tendin' the sugar-maples she sleepin' on the balsams with my coat throwed over her. "Things went on this way till 'bout three years ago, when I see she warn't gittin' ahead fast as she could, and I went for the old man to send her to school down to Plymouth.

Waves of that terrible lassitude, which is a positive anguish and not a mere absence of strength, flowed over her. The square of the doorway, which was directly before her eyes, began to take strange forms. It was filled with yellow sunlight, and a red glow beyond told of the sugar-maples at the edge of the clearing. Now it seemed to her unquiet sight to be a furnace.

"Tea!" screamed Francois; "why, there's not a leaf of tea nearer than China; and for the sugar, not a grain within hundreds of miles!" "Come, Frank," said Lucien, "nature has not been so ungenerous here, even in such luxuries as tea and sugar. Look yonder! You see those large trees with the dark-coloured trunks. What are they?" "Sugar-maples," replied Francois.

I spent all the fore-part of the next day in lounging about, watching the sluggish sap drain out of the sugar-maples, occasionally falling back on the female society of the place; for the Nevil had gone forth on the scout.

"Come, Frank," said Lucien, "nature has not been so ungenerous here, even in such luxuries as tea and sugar. Look yonder! You see those large trees with the dark-coloured trunks. What are they?" "Sugar-maples," replied François. "Well," said Lucien, "I think even at this late season we might contrive to extract sap enough from them to sweeten a cup of tea.

Enormous sugar-maples reared their forms here and there; occasionally a lithe birch lifted a tossing head; and, farther within, pines shot their straight trunks, arrow-like, up to the canopy above. Farther along, the road widened into a little clearing, beyond which the birch and maple trees gave place entirely to pines and hemlocks.

Here we have them all graphically represented: the daily "chores" that must be looked after; the driving of cows to and from the pasture; the clearing up of fields where vegetation struggled with difficulty against the prevailing stones; the climbing of lofty trees and the swaying back and forth in the wind on their topmost boughs; the hunting of woodchucks; the nutting excursions of November days, culminating in the glories of Thanksgiving; the romance of school life, over which vacations, far from being welcomed with delight, cast a gloom as involving extra work; the cold days of winter with its deep or drifting snows, the mercury of the thermometer clinging with fondness to zero, even when the sun was shining brilliantly; the long chilling nights in which the frost carved fantastic structures on the window-panes; the eager watching for the time when the sap would begin to run in the sugar-maples; the evenings given up to reading, with the inevitable inward discontent at being sent to bed too early; the longing for the mild days of spring to come, when the heavy cowhide boots could be discarded, and the boy could rejoice at last in the covering for his feet which the Lord had provided.