But the boy’s desire is to “sugar off” perpetually.  He boils his kettle down as rapidly as possible; he is not particular about chips, scum, or ashes; he is apt to burn his sugar; but if he can get enough to make a little wax on the snow, or to scrape from the bottom of the kettle with his wooden paddle, he is happy.  A good deal is wasted on his hands, and the outside of his face, and on his clothes, but he does not care; he is not stingy.

To watch the operations of the big fire gives him constant pleasure.  Sometimes he is left to watch the boiling kettles, with a piece of pork tied on the end of a stick, which he dips into the boiling mass when it threatens to go over.  He is constantly tasting of it, however, to see if it is not almost sirup.  He has a long round stick, whittled smooth at one end, which he uses for this purpose, at the constant risk of burning his tongue.  The smoke blows in his face; he is grimy with ashes; he is altogether such a mass of dirt, stickiness, and sweetness, that his own mother would n’t know him.

He likes to boil eggs in the hot sap with the hired man; he likes to roast potatoes in the ashes, and he would live in the camp day and night if he were permitted.  Some of the hired men sleep in the bough shanty and keep the fire blazing all night.  To sleep there with them, and awake in the night and hear the wind in the trees, and see the sparks fly up to the sky, is a perfect realization of all the stories of adventures he has ever read.  He tells the other boys afterwards that he heard something in the night that sounded very much like a bear.  The hired man says that he was very much scared by the hooting of an owl.

The great occasions for the boy, though, are the times of “sugaring-off.”  Sometimes this used to be done in the evening, and it was made the excuse for a frolic in the camp.  The neighbors were invited; sometimes even the pretty girls from the village, who filled all the woods with their sweet voices and merry laughter and little affectations of fright.  The white snow still lies on all the ground except the warm spot about the camp.  The tree branches all show distinctly in the light of the fire, which sends its ruddy glare far into the darkness, and lights up the bough shanty, the hogsheads, the buckets on the trees, and the group about the boiling kettles, until the scene is like something taken out of a fairy play.  If Rembrandt could have seen a sugar party in a New England wood, he would have made out of its strong contrasts of light and shade one of the finest pictures in the world.  But Rembrandt was not born in Massachusetts; people hardly ever do know where to be born until it is too late.  Being born in the right place is a thing that has been very much neglected.