The annex or temporary residence of those running the camp was generally a strong well-built cabin with one door, but no window. The door occasionally showed a want of confidence by being ornamented with a heavy padlock and chain. This little building entertained many a jolly crowd. It was the manufacturer’s office, storeroom, parlor, bedroom and restaurant. It was always a pleasant place to spend an evening, and, still more, a delightfully-sweet place on “_stirring-off_” days--to watch the golden bubbles burst in air and with noisy efforts rising to escape, driven back by their master with the enchantment of a fat-meat pill and made to dance to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy; for then was the time to dip and cool the wooden “_paddle_,” and taste again and again the charming sweetness of maple sugar in its native purity. But in less than a century sugar-trees, sugar-troughs, and pioneer sugar making have been classed with things of the past, scarcely known by the many, and remembered but by a few; and shows how soon time makes abandoned words and many simple expressions of facts obsolete and unknown. When it is said, “In infancy he was rocked in a sugar-trough,” the language to many is as figurative, hypothetical or meaningless as the “lullaby upon the tree tops.” The younger generations never saw the pioneer cradle, and Noah Webster did not get far enough West to incorporate the word in his “Revised Dictionary.” The ordinary use of sugar-troughs was to catch and hold the sweet water as it dripped from the “_spile_” placed in the sugar-tree. But under certain circumstances good specimens were devoted to other purposes, and not a few eminent lawyers, doctors, statesmen and divines have proudly referred to their cradling days as those having been well spent in the pioneer environment of a “sugar-trough.” The sugar made from trees was gradually superseded by cane and beet productions; and the supply has always remained equal to the demand at moderate prices; and not until 1887 did the country discover the necessity of a “Sugar Trust” to control and regulate the trade of the United States. This combine started with a capital of seven million dollars, capitalized at fifty millions, and again was watered up to seventy-five millions. This trust controlled four-fifths to ninety-eight per cent of all the refined sugar in the United States. The president of this trust has been receiving an annual salary of one hundred thousand dollars and the secretary seventy-five thousand. The stockholders have absorbed as dividends nearly four hundred million dollars in the eleven years of its existence, while thousands of its employes obtain but six dollars a week, working twelve hours each day in rooms at a temperature not much below two hundred degrees. The scales of justice are not often evenly balanced in trust monopolies that yield a net income of five hundred per cent profit on the capital invested.