But he turned back after a few yards to say--'Since yer hand's in, you 'most might jest as well fix a score troughs for me, in case some o' mine are leaked:' and away he went.
'That old sharper will be sure to have the best of the bargain,' thought Robert. 'It's just his knowledge pitted against my inexperience. One satisfaction is that I am learning every day.' And he went on with his troughs and spouts until near sundown, when he and Arthur went to look at the Indian encampment, and see what progress was being made there.
'I can't imagine,' said the latter, 'why the tree which produces only a watery juice in Europe should produce a diluted syrup in Canada.'
'Holt said something of the heat of the March sun setting the sap in motion, and making it sweet. You feel how burning the noon is, these days.'
'That's a statement of a fact, but not an explanation,' said the cavilling Arthur. 'Why should a hot sun put sugar in the sap?'
Robert had no answer, nor has philosophy either.
The Indians had already tapped their trees, and placed underneath each orifice a sort of rough bowl, for catching the precious juice as it trickled along a stick inserted to guide its flow. These bowls, made of the semicircular excrescences on a species of maple, serve various uses in the cooking line, in a squaw's ménage, along with basins and boxes of the universally useful birchen bark. When the sap has been boiled down into syrup, and clarified, it is again transferred to them to crystallize, and become solid in their keeping.
An Indian girl was making what is called gum-sugar, near the kettles: cutting moulds of various shapes in the snow, and dropping therein small quantities of the boiling molasses, which cooled rapidly into a tough yellowish substance, which could be drawn out with the fingers like toffy. Arthur much approved of the specimen he tasted; and without doubt the sugar-making was a sweetmeat saturnalia for all the 'papooses' in the camp. They sat about on the snow in various attitudes, consuming whole handfuls and cakes of the hot sweet stuff, with rather more gravity, but quite as much relish, as English children would display if gifted with the run of a comfit establishment.
'Did you ever see anything like their solemnity, the young monkeys!' said Arthur. 'Certainly the risible faculties were left out in the composition of the Indian. I wonder whether they know how to laugh if they tried?'