One of the familiar proceedings of the days of early spring in the long ago time, when the pioneers were busy with clearing the primeval forests of Ontario, was the maple sugar making. In our oldest settled parts of Ontario this is, of course, among the things that have been, simply because most of the maples have been ruthlessly slaughtered. On our good lands in Ontario the cleared fields pay better than maple orchards, our farmers have thought, and, much as we now regret the fact, still it is a fact that over most of our province the groves have been destroyed. Most of our youngsters have never experienced the delights of a sugaring-off, and many of our Old World citizens never yet tasted the nectar in its forest purity. Hence I infer that this chapter may give information and pleasure to many readers. The Jesuit Fathers, who were the first white men in this country among the Indians, tell us that the Indians made sugar regularly every spring by tapping the sugar maple. At this time the Indians did not have iron kettles for boiling the maple sap in. It became a curious question how they did manage to boil down the succulent juice without a kettle to boil it in. They tapped the trees with their tomahawks, and inserted a spile in the incision to conduct the sap from the tree to their vessel beneath. Their spile was a piece of dry pine or cedar wood, grooved on its upper side for the sap to flow down. No doubt this process was extremely crude; still, with all its crudities, they succeeded in producing a considerable quantity of sugar each spring. Their buckets were made by taking a roll of birch bark and sewing up the ends with deer sinews or roots. Thus they got a vessel capable of holding a pailful, and no doubt the sap caught in such vessels was just as sweet as that which we now gather in our bright tin pails, at far greater expense and trouble. Gathering the sap from the birchen buckets, it was carried by the original red man to the boiling place. At this boiling place was a large caldron made of large sheets of birch bark. Beside the caldron a fire was built, and in this fire was placed a lot of stones. As soon as the stones became heated to a red heat, they were dropped into the birchen caldron, previously filled with sap. By taking out the cooled stones and putting in more hot ones, and repeating the process, even slow as it was, they got the sap to boiling. Once got to boiling, by heating the extracted stones they kept up the boiling, and so continued the process until, after a time, they got the sap boiled down, and sugar was the result.