68 A MAPLE SUGAR CAMP.

‘down on the little frontier settlements, as hap-
pened once in the neighborhood of one called
“Number 4.” A certain good Deacon Adams
started on a bright frosty April morning to make
sugar on a hill a mile from the cluster of cabins. It

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HOUSE,

was in the time of
the old French
War when French
and Indians
joined together
against the Eng-
lish ; and a party
of them came down from Canada to this nook in
the wilderness. The unsuspecting man, as he was
trudging up the hill, was surrounded by seventy of
them and tied to a tree while they went off and
seized the next man they met, and the miller whose
mills they burned; then with those captives and
two hunters whom they took as they went along,
set off for Canada. It was the hapless deacon’s
last sugaring, for though he was afterwards ex-
changed, he died on the way home.
There is a pathetic story in the old records of a
_child lost from the sugar bush who never came
back and was never heard of after. The father
had a “boiling place,” at some distance from his
cabin, and his little boys, one six years old and

the other four, were fond of spending the day out.

there with him. Young as they were they could be
trusted, for those children living in the wilderness
were shrewd and sharp-witted, used to hardship
and on the lookout for danger; and, one day
when he was obliged to go to the cabin for
something, he felt safe in charging them to
stay by the fire till he came back. But the
elder one, happening to find a favorite spoon
which had been lost there, was so overjoyed
that.he set out at once to follow his father,
saying to the little one, “I will go up to the
house and show the spoon to father,” and
from that moment was never seen again,
though all the settlers for miles around
turned out and searched the wilderness day
and night, day and night as long as there was
a possibility of finding him.

A hundred years ago there was a growth of
grand rock maples in this part of New England,
and some of the farmers at the foot of the moun-

with kettles and tools on their backs, and
stay and tap the trees and make sugar. That
was camp life indeed. There were bears and
foxes in the woods and dens of the -rocks,
and the solitude was awful. Far up the
lonely mountain side, with miles of wilderness
between them and the little hamlets they had left,
whose lights they could see twinkle and then go
out as they sat under the roof of pine boughs and
watched the kettles through the night; but the
sugar-making came at a season too early for any
other work, and in those hard times “ boughten ”
sugar was dear and hard to get. There were trees
there then that were three feet through.

The rock maple is the beautiful tree of the
rugged New Hampshire hills, the natural growth
of rocky soil, as much as the firs and tiny white
birches upon the mountain tops, the pine on the
sandy lands, the elms on the meadows, the wil-
lows by the water. It will live two hundred years;
and it is such a wonderful thing for seeding itself
that we should find ourselves surrounded by a
wilderness in a few years if all the little maples
were let live.

Somebody fond of gathering statistics says that
in some of the little hill towns before trees were
cut down so, many families used to make half a
ton of sugar; Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont

tain (Kearsarge) used to go up on snowshoes, ©

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