whiskey, or fourth proof rum.  Allow this to nitrate through, until the sugar is white; dry the loaf, and redissolve it in boiling hot water, and evaporate it until it becomes dense enough to crystallise.  Now pour it into the cones again, and let it harden.  If any color remains, pour a saturated solution of refined white sugar on the base of the cone, and this syrup will remove all traces of color from the loaf.

One gallon of pasture maple sap yielded 3,451 grains of pure sugar.  One gallon of the juice of the sugar cane yields, on an average, in Jamaica, 7,000 grains of sugar.  Hence, it will appear that maple sap is very nearly half as sweet as cane juice; and since the maple requires no outlay for its cultivation, and the process may be carried on when there is little else to be done, the manufacture of maple sugar is destined to become an important department of rural economy.  It is well known, by the Report of the Statistics of the United States, that Vermont ranks next to Louisiana as a sugar state, producing (if I recollect correctly) 6,000,000 of pounds in some seasons, though the business is now carried on in a very rude way, without any apparatus, and with no great chemical skill; so that only a very impure kind of sugar is made, which, on account of its peculiar flavor, has not found its way into common use, for sweetening tea and coffee.  It would appear worth while, then, to improve this manufacture, and to make the maple sugar equal to any now in use.  This can be readily accomplished, if the farmers in the back country will study the process of sugar-making, for cane and maple sugar are, when pure, absolutely identical.  It should be remarked, that forest maples do not produce so much sugar as those grown in open fields or in groves, where they have more light, the under-brush being cleared away.

In Farmington, on the Sandy River, in Maine, I have seen a very fine grove of maples, but thirty years old, which produced a large yield of very good sugar.  A man and two boys made 1,500 lbs. of sugar from the sap of these trees in a single season.  The sap was boiled down in potash kettles, which were scoured bright with vinegar and sand.  The sugar was of a fine yellow color, and well crystallised.  It was drained of its molasses in casks, with a false bottom perforated with small holes—­the cask having a hole bored at the bottom, with a tow plug placed loosely in it, to conduct off the molasses.  This method is a good one, but the sap ought to be limed in boiling, as I have described; then it will not attach to the iron or copper boilers.  The latter metal must not be used with acid syrup, for copper salts are poisonous.

There are several towns in the northern sections of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, that produce more than sufficient sugar for the consumption of their inhabitants.  A lot of good sugar trees will average four pounds to the tree, in a favorable season.  Many farmers have orchards that will yield five hundred to a thousand pounds of sugar in a year.  As this is made at a season interfering very little with the general business of the farm, the sugar that the farmer makes is so much clear gain.