THE MYSTERY OF SPRING. 71

the bars had been taken down and the worn path
shewed that an ox team had passed that way many
times. It was the thing to do to follow it, now up,
now down, over hummocks and bowlders and dip-
ping into the snowy hollows, till we were within
the sylvan precincts, inhaling the woodsy smells,
and the odor of green things down in the root.
The sugar house was as cosey as Thoreau’s hut
at Walden; a regular hut in the woods, with its
two windows looking into the trees, a little lean-to
for the firewood, and the door where one could
sit and see the sights and hear the voices I had
dreamed about as children dream. The rugged
tree boles showed gray as far as the eye could
reach, and the phantom look of leafless boughs
was overhead; the hills, the far valley, the moun-
tains, were all the same with a difference; snow-

banks, wet hollows, lush moss and partridge ber-.

ries; it was in the woods, and of the woods; rural,
. far-off, fascinating.

Just then the foreground was occupied by the
ox-sled, still holding, bound to it by chains, the
barrel which had been drawn about under the

 

trees to receive the sap from the buckets which
now hung by their leathern loops empty and silent,
for the sap was not running.

The interior was a place for a boy to read Rod-
inson Crusoe in, or the old tales of Homer, while
he waited and watched, and sat up all night to
tend the fire, or to get one’s first taste of the
Midsummer Night’s Dream ; a place to tell stories
in with one’s comrades, or play fox-and-geese on
the rude board that hung on the wall, or to solve
problems and guess riddles, and get a firelight
education of a kind not set down in school books,
all sorts, odds and ends of wholesome learning,
with a good deal of nonsense of the right kind.

There is not a little of the work-a-day about the
experience of the sugar-makers out under the
maples, but a poetic and picnic side, too, that one
cannot afford to miss. And I mean to hold stoutly
by my statement in the beginning; and say that
that lone sugar house with its sylvan outlook and
its primitive inlook with its various properties,
and all we were made welcome to and free of, is
a delightful place to go to.

 

THE MYSTERY OF SPRING.

By Mrs. Mary B. Dooce.

OME, come, come, little Tiny,
Come, little doggie! We

Will “ interview ” all the blossoms

Down-dropt from the apple-tree ;
We'll hie to the grove and question *

Fresh grasses under the swing,
And learn if we can, dear Tiny,

Just what is the joy called Spring,

Come, come, come, little Tiny;
Golden it is, I know:
Gold is the air around us,
‘The crocus is gold below;
Red as the golden sunset
Is robin’s breast, on the wing —
But, come, come, come, little Tiny,
This isn’t the half of Spring.

Spring’s more than beautiful, Tiny;

Fragrant it is— for, see,
- We catch the breath of the violets

However hidden they be;

And buds o’erhead in the greenwood
The sweetest of spices fling —

Yet color and sweets together
Are still but a part of Spring.

Then come, come, come, little Tiny, .
Let’s hear what you have to tell
Learned of the years you’ve scampered
Over the hiil and dell —
What! Only a dark for answer?
Now, Tiny, that isn’t the thing
Will help unravel the riddle
Of wonderful, wonderful Spring,