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sure exactly what she meant by that, but she and Dinah both seemed to find it awfully funny.
    As we drove, I learned that driving a sleigh is more complicated than it looks in at least one interesting way. When you want to make a tight turn, you have to make sure the horse moves in the opposite direction first. For instance, to make a quick right, you first have to tug on the left rein so that the horse will shift a few steps to the left. Then the sleigh will move way over to the left side of the path, and it can make the turn to the right without pushing its shafts—those are the long wooden pieces that stick out from the sleigh on either side of the horse—into the horse’s body.
    Luckily, Betsy knew exactly how to manage the trick. So we made good time on the snowy, wooded paths.
    I was still having a hard time believing I was really there. The landscape looked as though it had been painted for the front of a greeting card or something. It was really beautiful. As we drove along through the peaceful, snow-blanketed forest, I turned to count the buckets in the back of the sleigh once more. That reminded me of the fraction problems I had waiting for me back in my suitcase. But I knew I would have to worry about that later. Because now we had work to do.
    I don’t like to brag, but I caught on to the tree-tapping process really fast. It didn’t hurt that Betsy and Dinah were such good teachers. They taught me all kinds of interesting things, like how to tell the sugar maples from the other trees(they’re marked with a little maple leaf, which is painted on in the summer when it’s easier to tell the trees apart) and how to decide where to place the spile (it’s usually a good idea to tap right under a big branch, since the tree sends lots of sap to branches that are growing fast).
    We tapped tree after tree, drilling holes, inserting spiles, and hanging buckets. After a while, I started to think we would never finish, that we could never possibly use up all the buckets we had brought in the sleigh. I was also starting to understand what Betsy had meant when she said I’d be wishing for a return to the twentieth century!
    We kept at it until it started to get dark. By that time, we still had two buckets left. None of us liked the thought of returning empty buckets, but we knew we had to hurry if we were going to find two more sugar maples. We also realized the trees would have to be easy to find, or we might forget where they were.
    We decided to look on our way back to the Sugar Hut. It was Dinah’s turn to drive.
    “Mr. Daviet thinks it’s important for all of us to learn to drive a horse on a wagon or sleigh,” Dinah told me as she picked up the reins and got started. After a minute or two, she offered to let me try driving for a few minutes. I said yes, of course. It looked like fun, and I had never driven anything except a tiny pony cart back at Pine Hollow.
    It took me a moment to get used to the feel of the long reins. They were much heavier in my hands than normal reins, which made sense—after all, they were more than ten feet long! I quickly realized that they would also be harderon the horse’s mouth than shorter reins, so just a bit of pressure would be enough to signal the horse clearly. It was exciting to drive, even just a few yards, and I was determined to learn more about driving sometime soon. I just love learning!
    Soon I gave the reins back to Dinah, and we continued on our way through the woods. We were all scanning the trees around us, looking for those maple-leaf marks so that we could use our last two buckets.
    “There’s one!” Dinah declared. She pulled the sleigh to a halt.
    “I see it,” Betsy said. In a flash, she was out of the sleigh and hard at work tapping the tree. Then we were off again, keeping a close watch for that one last tree we needed.
    “There must be one, there must be one,” Dinah said, almost chanting.
    My eyes were getting tired of squinting for tiny painted