It was David sure enough; and standing beside him in his customary motionless attitude was the Admiral harnessed into a great sledge surmounted by a barrel into which David was pouring the sap as fast as he gathered it. At the moment the man was busy detaching one of the sap buckets from the trunk of a giant maple. The boys joined him. "What are you doing, Dave?" asked Van curiously. "Doing! Ain't you got eyes, young man? I certainly ain't writing a book or taking a wireless message," he answered without turning his head. "But straight, I mean it. What are you doing? You know this business is new to me," explained Van. "Haven't you ever seen maple-sugar made?" David's tone was full of surprise. "Never." "Well, bless my soul! Where was you raised?" "In Colorado." "Humph! That accounts for it. If you'd been brought up in the East you'd have known." "But I was raised in the East, David, and I've never seen maple-sugar made," piped Bob, instantly overthrowing the old farmer's philosophy. "You ain't never--you ain't seen maple-syrup or maple-sugar made, Mr. Bob?" queried David aghast. "No." "Well, what are we coming to?" The farmhand surveyed the boys disdainfully. "What you been doing with yourself all your days?" he gasped at last. "I've been going to school." "And they ain't taught you to make maple-sugar? That's about all schooling is worth nowadays," he affirmed. "Now I warn't never inside a schoolhouse in my life, but I've known from the time I was knee-high to a grasshopper how to make maple-sugar. I made pounds of it before I was half the age of you two. The boys of this generation don't know nothin'!" He sniffed contemptuously. "Well, you may as well learn before you're a minute older," he continued. "Listen, now. Do you see the little hole in this maple?" He pointed up at the gray trunk above his head. "We make a little hole like that in every tree as soon as the sap begins to run in the early spring. Then we drive into the hole this small piece of hollow wood--it is like a trough, you see; and the sap runs through it into the buckets we hang beneath. All day and all night it drips in and each morning we go round and empty every pail into the cask we carry on the sledge. The sap, as you see, is thin, because only part of it is sugar; the rest is water. What we have to do is to boil down the liquid until the part that is water goes off in vapor and only the syrup is left. If we're after maple-syrup we let it cool when it gets thick and later bottle it; but if we want sugar we must boil the syrup still more until little crystals form in it." "How can you tell when it has been boiled enough?" questioned Van.