a sled by a team, and the sap is evaporated in broad, shallow, sheet-iron pans—a great saving of fuel and of labor. Many a farmer sits up all night boiling his sap, when the run has been an extra good one, and a lonely vigil he has of it amid the silent trees, and beside his wild hearth. If he has a sap-house, as is now so common, he may make himself fairly comfortable, and, if a companion, he may have a good time or a glorious wake. Maple-sugar in its perfection is rarely seen, perhaps never seen in the market. When made in large quantities and indifferently, it is dark and coarse; but when made in small quantities-that is, quickly from the first run of sap and properly treated-it has a wild delicacy of flavor that no other sweet can match. What you smell in freshly cut maple-wood, or taste in the blossom of the tree is in it. It is then, indeed, the distilled essence of the tree. Made into syrup, it is white and clear as clover-honey, and crystallized into sugar, it is pure as the wax. The way to attain this result is to evaporate the sap on the kitchen stove in tin pans or an enameled kettle; allow it to settle half a day or more, when reduced about twelve times; then clarify with milk or the white of an egg. The product is virgin syrup, or sugar worthy the table of the gods. Perhaps the most heavy and laborious work of the farm in the section of the state of which I write, is fence-building. But it is not unproductive labor, as in the South or West, for the fence is of stone and the capacity of the soil for grass or grain is, of course, increased by its construction. It is killing two birds with one stone: a fence is had, the best in the world, while the available area of the field is enlarged. In fact, if there are ever sermons in stones, it is when they are built into a stone-wall,turning your hindrances into helps, shielding your crops behind the obstacles to your husbandry, making the enemies of the plow stand guard over its products. This is the kind of farming worth imitating. A stonewall with a good rock bottom will stand as long as a man lasts. Its only enemy is the frost, and it works so gently that it is not till after many years that its effect is perceptible. An old farmer will walk with you through his fields and say, "This wall I built at such and such a time, or the first year I came on the farm, or when I owned such and such a span of horses," indicating a period thirty, forty, or fifty years back. "This other, we built the summer so and so worked for me," and he relates some incident, or mishap, or comical adventures that the memory calls up. Every line of fence has a history; the mark of his plow or his crow-bar is upon the stones; the sweat of his early manhood put them in place; in fact, the long black line covered with lichens and in places tottering to the fall, revives longgone scenes and events in the life of the farm. The time for fence-building is usually between seed-time and harvest, May and June; or in the fall after the crops are gathered. The work has its picturesque features,-the prying of rocks; supple forms climbing or swinging from the end of the great levers, or the blasting of the rocks with powder; the hauling of them into position with oxen or horses, or with both; the picking of the stone from the greensward; the bending, athletic form of the wall layers; the snug new fence creeping slowly up the hill or across the field absorbing the windrow of loose stone, and when the work is done much ground reclaimed to the plow and the grass, and a strong barrier erected. It is a common complaint that the farm and farm life are not appreciated by our people. We long for the more elegant pursuits, or the ways and fashions of the town. But the farmer has the most sane and natural occupation, and ought to find life. sweeter, if less highly seasoned, than any other. He alone, strictly speaking, has a home. How can a man take root and thrive without land? thrive without land? He writes his history upon his field. How many ties, how many resources he has; his friendships with his cattle, his team, his dog, his trees, the satisfaction in his growing crops, in his improved fields; his intimacy with Nature, with bird and beast, and with the quickening elemental forces; his co-operations with the cloud, the sun, the seasons, heat, wind, rain, frost. Nothing will take the various social distempers which the city and artificial life breed out of a man like farming, like direct and loving contact with the soil. It draws out the poison. It humbles him, teaches him patience and reverence, and restores the proper tone to his system. Cling to the farm, make much of it, put yourself into it, bestow your heart and your brain upon it, so that it shall savor of you and radiate your virtue after your day's work is done! A WIND STORM IN THE FORESTS OF THE YUBA. THE mountain winds, like the dew and rain, sunshine and snow, are measured and bestowed with wise love upon the forests, with reference to the development of their highest beauty and well-being. However restricted the scope of other forest influences, that of the winds is universal. The snow bends and trims the upper forests every winter, the lightning strikes a single tree here and there, while avalanches mow down thousands at a single swoop, as a gardener thins out a bed of flowers. But the winds go to every tree; not one is forgotten; the mountain pine, towering with outstretched arms upon the rugged buttresses of the Alps, the lowliest and most retiring tenant of the dells-they seek and find them all, caressing them tenderly, bending them in lusty exercise, stimulating their growth, plucking off a leaf or limb, or removing an entire tree or grove; now whispering and cooing through their branches like a dreamy child, now roaring like the ocean. The wind blessing the forest, the forest the wind, with ineffable beauty as the sure result. After one has seen pines six feet in diameter bending like grasses before a mountain gale, and ever and anon some giant falling with a crash that shakes the hills, it seems astonishing that any, save the lowest thickset trees, could ever have found a period sufficiently stormless to establish themselves; or, once established, that they should not, sooner or later, have been blown down. But when the storm is over, and we behold the same forests tranquil again, towering fresh and unscathed in erect majesty, and consider what centuries of storms have fallen upon them since they were first planted, hail, to break the tender seedlings; lightning, to scorch and shatter; snow, winds, and avalanches, to crush and overwhelm, while the manifest result of all this wild storm-culture is the glorious perfection we behold; then faith in Nature's forestry is established, and we cease to deplore the violence of her most destructive gales, or of any other storm-implement whatsoever. There are two trees in the Sierra forests that are never blown down, so long as they continue in sound health. These are the Alpine juniper and the dwarf Pinus albicaulis of the summit peaks. Their stiff, crooked roots grip the storm-beaten ledges like eagles' claws, while their lithe, cord-like branches bend round compliantly, offering but a slight hold for any wind. The other Alpine conifers,-Pinus aristata, the mountain pine, the two-leafed pine, and the Williamson spruce, -on account of their admirable toughness and the closeness of their growth, are never thinned out by this agent to any destructive extent. The same is, in general, true of the giants of the lower zones. The kingly sugar-pine towers aloft to a height of more than two hundred feet, offering a fine mark to storm-winds; but it is not densely foliaged, and its long, horizontal arms swing round compliantly in the blast, like tresses of green, fluent algæ in a brook; while the silver firs in most places keep their ranks well together in united strength. The yellow or silver pine is more frequently overturned than any other tree on the Sierra, because its leaves and branches form the largest mass in proportion to its height, while in many places it is planted sparsely, leaving long, open lanes, through which storms may enter with full force. Furthermore, because it is distributed along the lower portion of the range, which was the first to be left bare on the breaking up of the ice-sheet at the close of the glacial winter, the soil it is growing upon has been longer exposed to postglacial weathering, and consequently is in a more crumbling, decayed condition than the fresher soils farther up the range, and offers a less secure anchorage for the roots. T While exploring the forest zones of Mount Shasta, discovered the path of a hurricane strewn with thousands of pines of this species. Great and small had been uprooted or wrenched off by sheer force, making a clean gap, like that made by a snow avalanche. But hurricanes capable of doing this class of work are rare in the Sierra, and when we have explored the forest belts from one extremity of the range to the other, we are compelled to believe that they are the most beautiful on the face of the earth, however we may regard the agents that have made them so. There is always something deeply exciting, not only in the sounds of winds in the woods, which exert more or less influence over every mind, but in their varied waterlike flow as manifested by the movements of the trees, especially those of the conifers. By no other are they rendered so extensively and impressively visible, not even by the A WIND STORM IN THE CALIFORNIA FORESTS. (AFTER A SKETCH BY THE AUTHOR.) lordly tropic palms or tree-ferns responsive to the gentlest breeze. The waving of a forest of the giant sequoias is indescribably sublime, but the pines seem to me the best interpreters of winds. They are mighty waving golden-rods, ever in tune, singing and writing wind-music all their long century lives. Little, however, of this noble treewaving and tree-music will you see or hear in the strictly Alpine portion of the forests. The burly juniper, whose girth sometimes more than equals its height, is about as rigid as the rock on which it grows. The slender lash-like sprays of the dwarf-pine stream out in wavering ripples, but the tallest and slenderest are far too unyielding to wave even in the heaviest gales. They only shake in quick, short vibrations. The Williamsonspruce, however, and the mountain-pine, and some of the tallest thickets of the twoleafed species bow in storms with considerable scope and gracefulness. But it is only in the lower and middle zones that the meeting of winds and woods is to be seen in all its grandeur. One of the most beautiful and exhilarating storms I ever enjoyed occurred in December, 1874, when I happened to be exploring one of the tributary valleys of the Yuba. The sky and the ground and the trees had been thoroughly rain-washed and were dry again. The day was intensely pure, one of those incomparable bits of California winter, warm and balmy and full of white sparkling sunshine, redolent of all the purest influences of the spring, and at the same time enlivened with one of the most cordial wind-storms conceivable. Instead of camping-out as I usually do, I then chanced to be stopping at the house of a friend. But when the storm began to sound, I lost no time in pushing out into the woods to enjoy it. For on such occasions nature has always something rare to show us, and the danger to life and limb is hardly greater than one would experience crouching deprecatingly beneath It was still early morning when I found myself fairly adrift. Delicious sunshine came pouring over the hills, lighting the tops of the pines, and setting free a steam of sum- | pressing itself in its own way,-singing its mery fragrance that contrasted strangely own song, and making its own peculiar with the wild tones of the storm. The air gestures,-manifesting a richness of variety was mottled with pine-tassels and bright to be found in no other forest I have yet green plumes, that went flashing past in the seen. The coniferous woods of Canada, sunlight like pursued birds. But there was and the Carolinas, and Florida, are made not the slightest dustiness,—nothing less pure up of trees that resemble one another about than leaves, and ripe pollen, and flecks of as nearly as blades of grass, and grow close withered bracken and moss. Trees were together in much the same way. Coniferheard falling for hours at the rate of one ous trees, in general, seldom possess indievery two or three minutes; some uprooted, vidual character, such as is manifest among partly on account of the loose, water-soaked oaks and elms. But the California forests condition of the ground; others broken are made up of a greater number of distinct straight across, where some weakness caused species than any other in the world. And by fire had determined the spot. The gest- in them we find, not only a marked differures of the various trees made a delightful entiation into special groups, but also a study. Young sugar-pines, light and feath- marked personality in almost every individery as squirrel-tails, were bowing almost to ual tree, giving rise to storm effects indethe ground; while the grand old patriarchs, scribably glorious. whose massive boles had been tried in a hundred storms, waved solemnly above them, their long, arching branches streaming fluently on the gale, and every needle thrilling and ringing and shedding off keen lances of light like a diamond. The Douglass spruces, with long sprays drawn out in level tresses, and needles massed in a gray, shimmering glow, presented a most striking appearance as they stood in bold relief along the hill-tops, and so did the madronas in the dells with their red bark and bowed glossy leaves tilted every way, reflecting the sunshine in throbbing spangles like those one so often sees on the rippled surface of a glacier lake. But the silver-pines were now the most impressively beautiful of all. Colossal spires two hundred feet in height waved like supple golden-rods chanting and bowing low as if in worship, while the whole mass of their long, tremulous foliage was kindled into one continuous blaze of white sun-fire. The force of the gale was such that the most steadfast monarch of them all rocked down to its roots with a motion plainly perceptible when one leaned against it. Nature was holding high festival, and every fiber of the most rigid giants thrilled with glad excitement. I drifted on through the midst of this passionate music and motion, across many a glen, from ridge to ridge; often halting in the lee of a rock for shelter, or to gaze and listen. Even when the grand anthem had swelled to its highest pitch, I could distinctly hear the varying tones of individual treesspruce, and fir, and pine, and leafless oakand even the infinitely gentle rustle of the withered grasses at my feet. Each was exVOL. XVII.-5. Toward midday, after a long, tingling scramble through copses of hazel and ceanothus, I gained the summit of the highest ridge in the neighborhood; and then it occurred to me that it would be a fine thing to climb one of the trees to obtain a wider outlook and get my ear close to the Æolian music of its topmost needles. But under the circumstances the choice of a tree was a serious matter. One whose instep was not very strong seemed in danger of being blown down, or of being struck by others in case they should fall; another was branchless to a considerable height above the ground, and at the same time too large to be grasped with arms and legs in climbing; while others were not favorably situated for clear views. After thus cautiously casting about, I made choice of the tallest of a group of Douglass spruces that were growing close together like a tuft of grass, no one of which seemed likely to fall unless all the rest fell with it. Though comparatively young, they were about a hundred feet high, and their lithe, brushy tops were rocking and swirling in wild ecstasy. Being accustomed to climb trees in making botanical studies, I experienced no difficulty in reaching the top of this one, and never before did I enjoy so noble an exhilaration of motion. The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a bobolink on a reed. In its widest sweeps my tree-top described an arc of from twenty to thirty degrees, but I felt sure of its elastic temper, having |