Soon the gathering barrel was full and the horse plodded back to the sugar house, where from the hillside the sap ran into the sapholder, a twenty-one barrel cask propped up within, thence to go by gravity through a tube to the pan. Here the elder Grimes was busy, feeding the roaring fire with four-foot sticks, skimming the scum from the boiling sap and drawing the syrup into gallon cans at the other end. Sugar making is no job for a lazy man, even though the pan regulates the flow of the sap automatically, nor is it nowadays to be conducted without some capital. The plant is a small one, yet here, counting house, tools, tanks, pan, buckets, etc., was an investment which easily figured up a thousand dollars. The clear liquid from the trees ran in a steady stream, and the boiling sap bubbled and frothed in one end and collected in palest amber shallows in the other. Now that the run is started from eight to thirty barrels of sap a day will come to the sugar house, taxing the powers of the sugar maker to the uttermost to keep ahead of the flow. It does not do for the sap to wait. The best syrup is made from it when first collected and it will spoil if the delay before boiling is too long. Often the fires roar and the sap boils for the greater part of the twenty-four hours. It may be one or even three o’clock in the morning during a good run before the man at the pan can let his fire go out and snatch a few hours’ sleep. If the night has been warm gathering may begin again soon after sunrise and again he must be at his fires. It is at the sugar house that the business of making maple sugar has lost much of the romance of old days. The big black kettle in the little shed or the open woods with its sugaring-off frolics by the boys and girls is a thing of the past. In its place you have a small factory equipment running overtime, with much of the regularity of factory drudgery, while the short season lasts. Yet it is a godsend to the farmer. His winter’s work in the woods is done. His farm work has not yet begun, and the sugar brings in many hundred dollars in ready cash, readier cash than he gets on any other farm product. Good syrup brings from $1 to $1.25 a gallon, and on a recent year it was estimated the returns from maple sugar averaged over $3 each for every man, woman and child in the State. That of course is gross returns, not profits. These vary so greatly in individual cases and in various years that it is impossible to get at the net result. Some Vermont farmers do not think that sugar pays, and many have even gone to the extent of cutting off their groves for wood, preferring the cash from the trees once for all. This, of course, is killing the goose, for it greatly depreciates the value of the farm. Indeed it is an axiom in the Green Mountain State that a farm without a sugar orchard is an unmarketable commodity. For all that it is safe to say that for one reason or another not half the available trees in the State are tapped yearly.