106 OLD-TIME
ing; and, if the crusts were growing too brown, she
covered them with large green leaves. She could not
use yesterday’s daily paper, since yesterday had brought
her no such thing. I doubt if she ever saw one. In
spring she made -pies of sorrel. On baking days
the children were sent to gather a quantity of fresh
young green sorrel leaves—the old leaves were
tough and bitter. After covering a plate with paste
she piled it high with the carefully washed and
picked sorrel, put on plenty of maple sugar, and
covered it with paste. Sometimes she scalded the
leaves slightly: then she could judge better of the
quantity to put in. Should you try to make sorrel
pies, girls, remember sorrel takes as much sugar as
rhubarb. America had not then become a “pie-
eating nation,” but Madame Whitney made more
than her neighbors, especially when pumpkins came.
Oh, the pumpkin! I don’t know what our pioneers
would have done without it. It was easily raised
and much used. They put it into brown bread to
give it a sweet taste; they ate it simply stewed; they
cut it in long strips and dried it over the fire, or
stewed it and dried it in the oven after the bread had
been drawn out; they made pies of it, and some-
times they even made from it an
inferior kind of syrup. “ Didn’t they

COOKERY.

buckets, iron spouts and great reservoirs, and all the
modern appliances which are locked in his father’s
sugar-house.

Oh, yes; there were plenty of maple-trees, but
nothing else. Before sugar could be made, Cyrus
and his father must work many a long evening chop-
ping and burning out troughs to be used in place of
buckets. They also made spouts by burning out the
pith of some soft-hearted wood with a hot spindle.
They tapped the trees by boring with a large auger,
or else cut in them a long diagonal gash with an
axe, turning out a chip on the lower end to conduct.
the sap, in place of a spout. Either method would
be considered gross cruelty to the tree by a modern
sugar-maker. Many families had only their dinner-
pot or a small wash-kettle to boil down sap in; but
Madame Whitney had saved from the sale of the
saltpetre works an immense kettle, and brought it all
the way to Vermont. Mr. Whitney hung this old

‘saltpetre-kettle by means of a large chain, to a stout,

well-braced pole, slung the great dinner-pot beside

 
 
 
  
    

TOO PRECIOUS TO BE KILLED.

have sugar enough ?” some farmer’s boy asks, “with
the town half covered with maple-trees?” And I
suppose he sees heaters and evaporators and tin

it, tapped the trees, and then left the boys to make
the year’s supply of sugar. Merry times they had
too, though all the sap was gathered by hand. Ben