...  This curious phenomenon I have witnessed many times since.  Even in the morning choir, when every little throat seems strained in emulation, if the mocking-bird breathes forth in one of its mad, bewildered, and bewildering extravaganzas, the other birds pause almost invariably, and remain silent until his song is done.  This, I assure you, is no figment of the imagination, or illusion of an excited fancy; it is just as substantial a fact as any other one in natural history.  Whether the other birds stop from envy, as has been said, or from awe, cannot be so well ascertained, but I believe it is from the sentiment of awe, for as I certainly have felt it myself in listening to the mocking-bird, I do not know why these inferior creatures should not also.

* * * * *

=_Charles Lanman, 1819-._= (Manual, p. 505.)

From “Haw-ho-noo.”

=_266._= MAPLE-SUGAR-MAKING AMONG THE INDIANS.

It is in the month of April, and the hunting season is at an end.  Albeit, the ground is covered with snow, the noonday sun has become quite powerful; and the annual offering has been made to the Great Spirit, by the medicine-men, of the first product of one of the earliest trees in the district.  This being the preparatory signal for extensive business, the women of the encampment proceed to make a large number of wooden troughs (to receive the liquid treasure), and after these are finished, the various trees in the neighborhood are tapped, and the juice begins to run.  In the mean time the men of the party have built the necessary fires, and suspended over them their earthen, brass, or iron kettles.  The sap is now flowing in copious streams, and from one end of the camp to the other is at once presented an animated and romantic scene, which continues day and night, until the end of the sugar season.  The principal employment to which the men devote themselves, is that of lounging about the encampment, shooting at marks, and playing the moccasin game; while the main part of the labor is performed by the women, who not only attend to the kettles, but employ all their leisure time in making the beautiful birchen mocucks, for the preservation and transportation of the sugar when made; the sap being brought from the troughs to the kettles, by the boys and girls.  Less attention than usual is paid by the Indians at such times to their meals; and unless game is very easily obtained, they are quite content to depend upon the sugar alone.

It was now about the middle of June, and some fifty birchen canoes have just been launched upon the waters of Green Bay.  They are occupied by our Ottawa sugar-makers, who have started upon a pilgrimage to Mackinaw.  The distance is near two hundred miles, and as the canoes are heavily laden not only with mocucks of sugar, but with furs collected by the hunters during the past winter, and the Indians are travelling at their leisure, the party will probably reach their