Annals of our ancestors; one hundred and fifty years of history in the ...

HOME BUILDING IN MINNESOTA 239
opportunity to see how my men folks made sugar. Their
troughs were all new and clean, and so the sugar was fair and
clear. Indeed it was the lightest colored and finest grained
sugar from any camp that season. They molded the sugar in
milk pans. The whole process was of interest to us — the
evaporating of the sap to syrup in the large evaporating pan,
the hoiling of the syrup down to sugar in the big iron kettle;
the molding of the soft sugar in the milk pans, and at last the
boxing of the cakes to take home. It was all our own, the true
Watkins Way — "direct from the laboratory to the consumer!"
We dined with the campers and ate all the warm maple sugar
we could, which the initiated will know is not a great deal.
Spring was well at the door. The lakes were open when
our boys left the camp and brought home tneir wealth of sugar,
four hundred pounds in all; and the great cakes of fair and
beautiful sugar were placed on the pantry shelves, one above
another, until they were fairly bending beneath their load of
sweetness. As soon as the weather permitted we were desirous
of moving down near the Roberts place on Carnelian Lake,
where lay the land we had rented for the summer. Alvah had
done the fall plowing on this place in order to have it ready for
early planting in the spring. I remember how deep was the
snow about the house and garden, where it seemed almost impossible
for even the spring sun to melt the drifts. One day
Amos climbed up on the garden fence and jumped out into
a snow bank up to his armpits, and that was in April. However,
spring was only delaying, and it was yet to come and open
the waterways over which our parents and brother and sister
and William's dear wife and baby were to travel to us.
The Indians were still about us — I remember, one day
when "Aunt Eliza" and we were talking of Indians, she told
us that a small band had been camping in the timber near our
lake, and while we were thus engaged in conversation I looked
out to see an Indian dressed in a blue suit with a blue cord for
trimming. I learned later that this was a Christian Indian,
by name Lorenzo Laurence. He came in to ask us if we had
heard that this band had been stealing from the settlers. We
told him we had not. He related something of his history to