“How much did you drink?” asked his mother.
“Oh—only a little,” Cuffy answered
faintly.
Then Mrs. Bear nodded her head three times. She
was very wise—was Mrs. Bear. And she
knew quite well that Cuffy had drunk a great deal too
much of that nice-tasting water. So she made
Cuffy lie down and gave him some peppermint leaves
to chew. In a little while he began to feel so
much better that before he knew it he had fallen asleep.
When Cuffy waked up he found that his father had come
home. And soon Mr. Bear had Cuffy on one knee,
and Silkie on the other, and he was telling them all
about maple-sugar. For of course you knew all
the time that what Cuffy had found was not a spring
at all—but a sugar-maple tree, which Farmer
Green had tapped so that he might gather the sap and
boil it until it turned to maple-sugar. If Cuffy
had gone further down the mountainside he would have
found a great many other trees, each—like
the one he discovered—with a tin bucket
hanging on it to catch the sweet sap.
“So you see there are many things for little
bears to learn,” Mr. Bear said, when he had
finished. “And the one big lesson
you must learn is to keep away from men. Farmer
Green visits those trees every day to gather the sap.
So you must not go down there again.”
A cold shiver went up and down Cuffy’s back
at these words. Farmer Green! Cuffy had
heard a great deal about Farmer Green and he certainly
did not want to meet him all alone and far from home.
But as soon as the tickle of that shiver stopped,
Cuffy forgot all about his fright.
“This maple-sugar—does it taste as
good as the sweet sap?” he asked his father.
“Yes, my son—a hundred times better!”
Mr. Bear replied. “I ate some once And
I shall never forget it.”
A hundred times better! After he had gone to
bed that night the words kept ringing in Cuffy’s
ears. A hundred times better! A hundred times
better!... A hundred—And now Cuffy
was fast asleep and—I am sorry to say it—sucking
one of his paws for all the world as if it was a piece
of Farmer Green’s maple-sugar.
CUFFY AND THE MAPLE-SUGAR
Another day had come and all the morning long Cuffy
Bear and his sister Silkie played and played as hard
as they could. They played that they were making
maple-sugar. And they pretended to hang buckets
on all the trees near Mr. Bear’s house.
There were no maple trees about Cuffy’s home—only
pine and hemlock and spruce—but if you are
just pretending to make maple-sugar any sort
of tree will do.
While they were playing Cuffy kept wishing for some
real maple-sugar. After all, the little
cakes of snow that he and Silkie made and called
maple-sugar seemed very tasteless, no matter how much
Cuffy pretended. And later, when Silkie was taking
her nap, and Cuffy had no one to play with, he became
so angry with the make-believe sugar that he struck
the little pats of snow as hard as he could and spoiled
them. And then, after one look toward the door
of his father’s house—to make sure
that his mother did not see him—Cuffy started
on a trot down the mountainside.
