ed the
branch. So they turned and worked their way painfully down the stream.
At last, however, they reached a place where the brambles and bushes
seemed to form a perfect wall before them. It was impossible to get
through.

"Let's go home," said Willy. "'Tain't any use to try to get through
there. My legs are scratched all to pieces now."

"Let's try and get out here," said Frank, and he turned from the wall
of brambles. They crept along, springing from hummock to hummock.
Presently they came to a spot where the oozy mud extended at least
eight or ten feet before the next tuft of grass.

"How am I to get the gun across?" asked Willy, dolefully.

"That's a fact! It's too far to throw it, even with the caps off."

At length they concluded to go back for a piece of log they had seen,
and to throw this down so as to lessen the distance.

They pulled the log out of the sand, carried it to the muddy spot, and
threw it into the mud where they wanted it.

Frank stuck his pole down and felt until he had what he thought a
secure hold on it, fixed his eye on the tuft of grass beyond, and
sprang into air.

As he jumped the pole slipped from its insecure support into the miry
mud, and Frank, instead of landing on the hummock for which he had
aimed, lost his direction, and soused flat on his side with a loud
"spa-lash," in the water and mud three feet to the left.

He was a queer object as he staggered to his feet in the quagmire; but
at the instant a loud "oof, oof," came from, the thicket, not a dozen
yards away, and the whole herd of hogs, roused, by his fall, from
slumber in their muddy lair, dashed away through the swamp with "oofs"
of fear.

"There they go, there they go!" shouted both boys, eagerly,--Willy, in
his excitement, splashing across the perilous-looking quagmire, and
finding it not so deep as it had looked.

"There's where they go in and out," exclaimed Frank, pointing to a low
round opening, not more than eighteen inches high, a little further
beyond them, which formed an arch in the almost solid wall of
brambles surrounding the place.

As it was now late they returned home, resolving to wait until the
next afternoon before taking any further steps. There was not a pound
of bacon to be obtained anywhere in the country for love or money, and
the flock of sheep was almost gone.

Their mother's anxiety as to means for keeping her dependents from
starving was so great that the boys were on the point of