Ever so many small sharp valleys and ravines were revealed among the woods, some winding deep into the darkness of the pines and hemlocks. Their perfect curves were made more perfect by the unbroken snow, and they were flecked all over with the feathery blue shadows of their trees. At the bottom of one we heard a musical tinkling, and found a brook partly open. We scrambled down to it, and knelt there, watching it, till we were half frozen. The ice was frosted deep with delicate lace-work, and looking up underneath we saw a perfect wonderland of organ-pipes and colonnades of crystal, through which the water tinkled melodiously.
We came out high on the north side of Assimasqua, in the sugaring grove that spreads up the steep slope to the crest. The tall maples were very beautiful in their winter bareness, and the slope about their feet was massed with a close feathery growth of young balsam firs and hemlocks, with openings between. The snow lay even with the eaves of the small bark sugaring-shanty. The sight of a roof made the silence seem almost palpable, but in March the hillside will have plenty of sound and stir, for fires will be lighted and the big kettles swung, while the men come and go on sledges. Sugaring goes on all through the countryside, and even in the town boys are out with “spiles,” drilling the maple “shade-trees,” as soon as the sap begins running. The bright drops fall slowly, one by one, into the pail hung to the end of the spile, and the sap is like the clearest spring water, with a refreshing woodsy sweetness.
The high rough crest of Assimasqua dominates a wide stretch of country. The long sweep of the fields, and the lakes, lying asleep, showed perfect, featureless white, as we stood looking down; but all about, and in among them, the low broken hills, the knolls and ridges, bore scarfs or mantles of smoke-colored bare woods, mixed with evergreens.
All day the sky had been of an aquamarine color, of the liquid and luminous clearness which comes only in mid-winter, and deep afternoon shadows were falling as we came down the hillside. We were on snow-shoes, and had brought a toboggan, as the last part of our way lay down hill. The country was open below the sugaring grove, and the unbroken snow masked all the contours and mouldings of the fields, so that we found ourselves suddenly dropping into totally unrealized hollows and skimming up unrealized hillocks.