12. When did the leaves begin to fall? Place in your note book the date when the tree finally becomes bare. 13. Have you found any seeds from your tree? If so, describe them. 14. How are they dispersed and planted? 15. Are both seeds of the pair filled out? 16. How high is your tree? 17. How large an area of shade does it produce? If it stands alone, measure the ground covered by its shadow from morning until evening. 18. How has its shadow affected the plants beneath it? Are the same plants growing there that grow in the open field? 19. Make a sketch of the tree you are studying, showing its outline. 20. Make a sketch of the leaf of the sugar maple. LEAFLET XLVIII. THE MAPLE IN FEBRUARY.[65] BY ANNA BOTSFORD COMSTOCK. [65] Home Nature-Study Course, Vol. V, No. 5, February, 1904. SAP. Strong as the sea and silent as the grave, it ebbs and flows unseen: Flooding the earth,--a fragrant tidal wave, with mists of deepening green, --JOHN B. TABB. [Illustration] "Tapping the sugar bush" are magical words to the country boy and girl. The winter which was at first so welcome with its miracle of snow, and its attendant joys of sleighing and skating, begins to pall by the last of February. Too many days the clouds hang low and the swirling flakes make out-of-door pursuits difficult. Then there comes a day when the south wind blows blandly and the snow settles into hard, marble-like drifts, and here and there a knoll appears bare, and soggy, and brown. It is then that there comes just a suggestion of spring in the air; and the bare trees show a flush of living red through their grayness and every spray grows heavy with swelling buds. Well do we older folk remember that in our own childhood after a few such days the father would say, "We will get the sap buckets down from the stable loft and wash them, for we can tap the sugar bush soon if this weather holds." In those days the buckets were made of staves, and were by no means so easily washed as are the metal buckets of to-day. Still do we recall the sickish smell of musty sap that greeted our nostrils when we poured the boiling water in to cleanse those old, brown buckets. During the long winter evenings we had all had something to do with the fashioning of the sap spiles made from selected stems of sumac; after some older one had removed half of the small branch lengthwise with a draw-shave we younger ones had cleared out the pith, thinking thirstily meanwhile of the sweet liquid which would sometime flow there.