Harper's Young People, March 8, 1881 (Illustrated)

"Well, yes, Jerry," remarked Salina Meadows, "old Mr. Wire'll be glad to have anybody come to see him that knows as much about sugar as you do."
"It's all the hobby he's got," said her brother Phin. "He makes the best maple sugar in all these parts. Whitest and cleanest. Biggest lot of it, too."
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"I've heard him say," added Rush Potts, "that no man was ever too old to learn. Glad we could bring you along."
"There isn't much about sugar I don't know," replied Jerry Buntley, modestly, with a pull at his dog-skin gloves to make them fit tighter. "You just ought to see a real sugar plantation once."
"I would like to," said Hannah Potts, all the red in her rosy face coming to the surface to meet the wind that blew in her face from the direction of old Mr. Wire's great forest on the hill-side.
They were all cuddling down in Elder Meadows's great box sleigh, and Phin Meadows was putting the sorrel span along the road in a way that made their bells dance lively enough, for the March thaw had only just begun, and the sleighing was capital.
Jerry Buntley had told them more about sugar that day than they had ever heard before. It was a great treat to be invited to a maple-sugaring at old Mr. Wire's, and Jerry's country cousins were glad of having something worth while to take with them by way of payment; that is, they were glad to take Jerry.
He was glad to go, and he talked sugar until every soul in the sleigh thought he could taste candy, and Phin found himself comparing the color of his sorrel team to that of the five pounds his mother sent back to Barnes's grocery store, because, as she said, "She wasn't going to pay any 'leven cents a pound for building sand."
It was not many minutes before they pulled up in front of old Mr. Wire's big rambling old farm-house, and there were Jim and Sally Wire coming out to meet them. Old Mrs. Wire was in the doorway, and she looked twenty years younger as soon as they had a look at her husband. Mainly because the difference in their ages was a good deal more than that.
Nobody knew how tall Mr. Wire would have been if he had stood up, but the oldest old ladies around Lender's Mills village all said he'd had that stoop in his shoulders ever since they'd known him.
"My mother used to say," said Elder Meadows, "that old Wire's father was a short, stocky man, and built his log-house to fit himself, and so when his son got taller'n he was himself, he had to hold his head down, 'specially coming through the door."
There he was now, and the visitors had not been in the house five minutes before Salina Meadows told how much Jerry Buntley knew about sugar.
"His father sells tons of it, and his brother's a clerk in a sugar store, and his uncle's a book-keeper in a sugar refinery in the city—"
"Ten stories high!" put in Jerry, with a down look of modesty.
"—and he's seen sugar plantations, and molasses factories, and where they make all sorts of candy."
"You don't say!" exclaimed Mrs. Wire. "I'm glad you fetched him along."
"Wa'al, so'm I," said old Mr. Wire. "No man ain't ever too old to l'arn. I've only been a-b'ilin' sap for a leetle risin' of fifty year, and I don't know much. You're jest in time. The sun's lookin' down warm to-day, and we was jest a-wantin' to set out for the bush."
"It isn't the fur-away bush," said Mrs. Wire; "it's that there patch nighest the house. The trees ain't been tapped this five year, and they'll run the best kind."
"There'll be more here by-and-by," said Sally Wire. "Don't take your things off. We'll have a real good time."
Old Mr. Wire took Jerry Buntley right along with him—under his wing, as you might say. He asked him questions, too, and nobody could guess how many times Jerry made him exclaim, "You don't say!" or, "Do tell, now, is that so?"
The forest had been left standing on all that hill-side for nothing else in the world but sugar. It was not half an hour before the Wires and their visitors were crunching over the crust among the trees, or standing around the great fires that had been built and lit before they came. Every fire had a great iron kettle on it, and every kettle was bubbling for dear life, except when a dash of cold sap was ladled into it from the barrel that stood under the nearest tree.
"It's afternoon now," said Sally Wire. "I do hope the other folks'll get here before it's too dark. But then we can have a good time at the house in the evening."
"Boys," said old Mr. Wire, "if you want to help, you jest take them two auger bits and them spiles, and go and tap a fresh lot of trees over there to the east'ard. Jim and I'll go round with the buckets."
Wonderfully white and clean were all his buckets and shoulder-yokes, and his wooden troughs that caught the sap as it dripped into them from the ends of the wooden spiles he had driven into the trees he had tapped already. There was plenty of work for him and his son,