Page:Rural Hours.djvu/79

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Nor does the luxuriant beauty of the maple mislead us as to its properties; it is a highly valuable wood. We should be very thankful for its sugar, if that imported from other regions could not be procured; to the Indians it was very precious, one of the very few luxuries known to them. In winter, it ranks with the better sorts of fuel for heat and a cheerful blaze, and the different kinds are employed for very many useful and ornamental purposes. A large amount of furniture of the better sort is made of the various maples. A few years back, maple ranked next to mahogany for these purposes, but lately black walnut has been more in favor. With the exception of the ash-leaved variety, a Western tree, all the American maples are said to be found in this county. The moose-wood,^[1] a small tree of graceful, airy growth, and bearing the prettiest flowers of the tribe, to whose young shoots the moose is said to have been so partial; the mountain maple, a shrub growing in thick clumps with an upright flower, the scarlet maple, the silver, the sugar, and the black sugar maples, are all included among our trees. They all, except the shrubby mountain maple, yield a portion of sweet sap, though none is so liberal in the supply as the common sugar maple. The very largest trees of this kind in our neighborhood are said to be about three feet in diameter, and those of forest growth attain to a great height, from sixty to eighty feet; but the common maples about the country are rarely more than eighteen inches in diameter, and forty or fifty feet high.^[2] As their wood is usually sound

1. Sometimes twenty feet high, in this county.
2. The sugar maple does not thrive in England, seldom growing there to more than fifteen feet in height. The silver maple, on the contrary, succeeds very well in Europe.