When the first touch of spring stirred the sap of the maples, sugar-making began, a labor spiced with a woodsy flavor of camp life and small adventure. The tapping was done with a gouge; the sap dripped from spouts of sumach stems into rough-hewn troughs, from which it was gathered in buckets borne on a neck-yoke, the bearer making the rounds on snowshoes, and depositing the gathered sap in a big "store trough" set close to the boiling-place. This was an open fire, generously fed with four-foot wood, and facing an open-fronted shanty that sheltered the sugar-maker from rain and "sugar snow," while he plied his daily and nightly labor, now with the returning crow and the snickering squirrel for companions, now the unseen owl and fox, making known their presence with storm-boding hoot and husky bark. The sap-boiling was done in the great potash kettle that in other seasons seethed with pungent lye, but now, swung on a huge log crane, sweetened the odors of the woods with sugar-scented vapor. Many families saw no sweetening, from one end of the year to the other, but maple sugar and syrup, the honey from their few hives, or the uncertain spoil of the bee-hunter. All the young folks of a neighborhood were invited to the "sugaring off," and camp after camp in turn, during the season of melting snow and the return of bluebird and robin, rung with the chatter and laughter of a merry party that was as boisterous over the sugar feast as the blackbirds that swung on the maple-tops above them rejoicing over the return of spring. In the long evenings of late autumn and early winter, there were apple or paring bees, to which young folk and frolicsome elder folk came and lent a hand in paring, coring, and stringing to dry, for next summer's use, the sour fruit of the ungrafted orchards, and, when the work was done, to lend more nimble feet to romping games and dances, that were kept up till the tallow dips paled with the stars in the dawn, and daylight surprised the coatless beaux and buxom belles, all clad in honest homespun.