She ate the chocolate and waited for her favourite part of the story. You had to get the staves inside the hoops. First you stood them on their ends in a circle. You slid a small hoop over them. The small hoop stayed near the top. Then you slid a bigger hoop down to the middle, where the staves were fat. That was called the truss hoop. Now the cask looked like an upside-down cone standing on the floor. Alice Maud liked the upside-down part. That was called raising the cask.

"That sounds hard, Papa," she said. "What if the staves keep tumbling out?"

He laughed and wiped melted chocolate off her chin. He told her his staves never fell out.

The next part was his favourite part. The staves had to be bent. He had to swab the cask with water and set it over his cresset fire. The cresset fire was a special fire only coopers had. It fit in a little iron grate and burned wood shavings.

The fire steamed the damp staves. The staves softened. William went around the barrel with a five pound sledgehammer. He beat more hoops around the cask. First he used big hoops, then smaller ones, until the staves were drawn together into the shape of a barrel.

Then you dried the cask over a flame. The flame shrank the wood fibres and made the bent staves stay in place.

"Then the sun comes out!" Alice Maud always called out about the sun at this part. The sun was the name of the plane he used to trim the top of the cask. It was called that because it was the shape of half a circle. A lot of coopers' tools were round, because barrels were round.

He trimmed the top and cut the groove where the barrel head would fit.

Now came the magic part. You took all the hoops off except the two on the ends, and the barrel stayed together. You needed the hoops off so you could clean and shave the wood.

"It has to be smooth as baby skin," Alice Maud told her father.

"Does it?"

"Yes," she laughed. "Then you drive the real hoops on with a piece of chocolate cake!" When she was six he had told her he drove the hoops on with a wedge shaped like a piece of cake. She never forgot.

The snow was falling thick now. It stung his forehead. He pulled his cap down. He thought of little Alice Maud saying how the sun came out. He wondered if he was the only cooper in St. John's who made barrels out of the sun and chocolate cake.