You would enjoy helping to make some maple sugar, I am sure, so let us make a trip to the woods of Vermont or New York, where maple sugar is made from the sap of the sugar-maple tree.

You will need your cap and mittens, as the sugar season is the early spring, when there is yet snow on the ground. Besides, some of the work is done at night, and you will not wish to miss that.

The owner of the "sugar bush" bores holes into the trees a short distance from the ground, into which he slips small spouts, called "spiles."

This is called tapping the trees. Underneath the spout a pail is placed. During the day the sap trickles out and runs into the pail. During the colder hours of the night the sap flows slowly, if at all. Sometimes it is so cold that little sap runs for two or three days at a time.

The sap is collected in barrels and drawn on sleds to the camp or place where it is to be boiled down. This is done in great pans called evaporators, which may be five or six feet wide, and fifteen feet long. They are divided into sections, and these are connected by means of little openings.The sap flows into one end of the evaporator and follows a zigzag path through the different sections. By flowing slowly over so large a surface, evaporation goes on rapidly and the sap is changed to sirup by the time it has finished its journey.

The sirup is put up in cans, or boiled down into sugar, which is molded into small cakes, and brings a high price.

"Sugaring off," as the boiling down of the sap is called, is quite an event. Often a number of people will be invited to go to the sugarhouse and take part in the operation.Before the modern evaporator came into use "sugaring off" always occurred at night. This was necessary, because during the day the sap buckets had to be attended to. The young people would sing songs, tell stories, and eat sugar.

Some of the "sugar bushes" contain but a few trees and some contain one or two thousand or even more. A tree will yield from one to six pounds of sugar during a season.

Our country produces great quantities of sugar every year, but we use so much that we have to buy much more than we manufacture at home. It was not always in such common use, however, because people in olden times did not understand how to make it cheaply.

Long, long ago sugar was used only as a medicine. Don't you wish that all medicine to-day was as good as sugar? About seven hundred years ago an Italian nobleman died and left to his relatives, among other things, six pounds of sugar. His will caused considerable comment among the people, who said that no one family should be allowed to have so much sugar in its possession.