The Indians discovered the maple sugar industry long before they themselves were discovered by white people. They taught our New England ancestors how to tap the trees and boil down the sirup and how to "sugar off." They had little or no sugar except what the maples supplied. The Indians had very primitive ways of tapping the trees, collecting the sap, boiling, and sugaring. These ways have been improved in the last three hundred years. Although wooden buckets and home-made spiles made of sumach branches may still be used where only a few trees are tapped, the up-to-date sugar maker has modern, patent, covered buckets, spouts, and evaporators. He uses a thermometer and knows "for sure" when to shut off his fire if he wants to make sirup, and how high the temperature may go to make the best sugar. He knows, too, whether he can afford to make sugar which tests eighty per cent. or ninety per cent. pure and get the bounty, if his state pays one, or if it costs him less labour and expense to sell his entire product in the form of sirup. But scientific methods can never take away the charm of maple sugar making. There is so much yet to be learned from the trees about the whys and wherefores of their behaviour during the harvest, that our interest in maple products increases as our interest in mere "sweets" decreases. If you have a "sugar bush" planted by your great-grandfather, the chances are that you have had annual opportunities to help in making sugar, ever since you could drive a horse on frosty mornings to collect the sap. But I am going to suppose that during the winter you have been reading "Trees Every Child Should Know" and have been identifying the trees about your home. The maples are about the easiest trees to identify when leafless. Suppose you have found several maple trees, good big ones, right in your own door yard. The hard or sugar maple is the one most frequently used for sugar making, but experiments show that soft maples make good sugar too. It isn't worth while to tap trees in winter. The sugar is in them all right because the leaves were storing up the starch all summer. This starch has been changed to sugar in the living cells of the wood. But you couldn't get any of it until the sap begins to run. It does this with the first warm, sunny days of February.