camphorated spirits of wine. Seventy-five
years have elapsed since it was done, and
Mrs. Van Butchell, judging by her head, is
still a most respectable mummy. Another
female, who desired about the same period to
be so treated after her demise, and whose
wish was realised, is in a similar state of
preservation. But we have said enough. Let
those who would know more of the fine
collection, go and search out its curiosities
for themselves.

THE WEALTH OF THE WOODS.

THOSE uncultivated regions, dotted here
and there with trees, and serried everywhere
with brambles, which we of Europe call a
forest, is a garden compared with the least
extensive forest of New Brunswick. A
saunter only a few hundred yards from a
New Brunswick settlement suddenly brings
you to a barrier of trees, firmly rooted, side
by side, in the severest military order, and
you are told that that (pointing between the
crevices of the trees) is your way into the
forest; the reflection at once passes through
your mind that the famed Daniel Lambert
would have been an indifferent backwoodsman.
However you are in a North American
wilderness, a few hundred miles from the most
distant approach to the comforts of civilisation;
and your resolution to make the best
of matters is strong. With a desperate effort,
that rapidly pumps the blood into your face,
you force your way through the barrier. In
a few minutes you are buried in the vast
solitude. You hear the chirp of birds at a
great height. It is March, and you are
reminded that about this season of the year the
black bear, having sucked the thick part of
his paw throughout the winter, and taken no
other kind of nourishment, issues from his
den in quest of more substantial fare. This
reflection, however unpleasant at first, is
soon dispelled by the marvellous variety
of the scene. Life in a thousand forms
is busy about you. Pussy is changing her
winter coat of white for the grey of
summer; and the fox is quietly speculating
upon the hen who is sitting under your
neighbour's shed. After a quarter of an
hour's desperate scrambling you emerge into
a small open space; and are startled to find a
busy band of people at work. On inquiry,
you learn that you have surprised the workers
of a maple-sugary. The sugar maples, into
which holes have been bored, are noble trees,
rising, in some instances, to the height of
seventy or eighty feet. The ground on which
they grow is a gentle declivity, in the valley
of which a stream, with bits of frail ice still
clinging about its banks, bubbles along. The
back of the rock or sugar maple is of a
dazzling whiteness. The sugar camp is a
rough shanty, pitched in one corner of the
cleared space, to shelter those who attend
to the kettles. The process of extracting the
saccharine sap and reducing it to sugar is, at
present, rude, and perhaps wasteful. The
trees are perforated with an auger in an
oblique upward direction, at about twenty
inches from the ground, and on the south
side. The trough, which is to receive the
sap is placed at the foot of the tree, and
left there throughout the day, at the close of
which its contents are poured into casks, or
into a huge trough made of the hollowed
trunk of a birch tree. The evaporation is
kept up by a brisk fire, night and day, until
the liquid is reduced to a syrup. It is then
strained through a blanket. Afterwards it
is boiled till reduced to the proper consistency
for being poured into the moulds. When
properly refined, the maple-sugar of New
Brunswick equals in quality and beauty the
finest sugar consumed in Europe. Maple sap
is also convertible into vinegar by acetous
fermentation under the rays of the sun.

Maple-sugar is consumed throughout New
Brunswick, and in various other parts of the
American Continent. Some of the sugaries
tap eight hundred trees annually; yet these
trees, so valuable for their saccharine matter
(and the extraction of which does not
retard their growth), have been
indiscriminately felled by the settlers; and already
many New Brunswick farmers when they
hear of the pains the people of the
United States are taking to plant maple
orchards, look back with regret to the noble
maple groves they have chopped up into
firewood. The wood when worked has a rosy
tinge, and a silky texture. It exhibits two
accidental forms, which give it additional
value in the eyes of cabinet makers. One is
known as "curled maple," that is, maple with
an undulating grain, such as the red flowering
maple (which also grows plentifully in the
dense forests of New Brunswick) often shows.

The second accidental formation of which
cabinet makers take advantage, is found only
in old trees. It consists of an inflexion of the
fibre from the circumference towards the
centre, producing spots of half a line in
diameter, sometimes contiguous, and
sometimes several lines apart. This formation is
called "bird's-eye maple." The sugar-maple
is now beginning to be imported into this
country in considerable quantities. Even
from the excrescences or knobs of this
beautiful and valuable tree, cabinet-work of
rare beauty is manufactured by the French.

Passing from the sugary, and leaving behind
you the graceful rows of silver maple, that
look like fairies' wands, you may pass one or
two stunted grey oaks. The severe winter
dwarfs them, yet their wood is sound and
hard, and serves for agricultural implements,
and sleighs. Your attention is, however,
soon taken from the puny oaks to be rivetted
upon some magnificent specimens of vegetation.
The grand walnut or butternut trees of
New Brunswick, are hardly known in
England. The butternut, however, makes noble