unaccountable
but for the testimony of Duncan and Kenneth, who had received her
sisterly caresses before she joined Hector at the barn; and much her
mother marvelled what could have induced her good dutiful Catharine to
have left her work and forsaken her household duties to go rambling away
with the boys, for she never left the house when her mother was absent
from, it, without her express permission, and now she was gone--lost
to them, perhaps for ever. There stood the wheel she had been turning,
there hung the untwisted hanks of yarn, her morning task,--and there
they remained week after week and month after month, untouched, a
melancholy memorial to the hearts of the bereaved parents of their
beloved.

It were indeed a fruitless task to follow the agonized fathers in their
vain search for their children, or to paint the bitter anguish that
filled their hearts as day passed after day, and still no tidings of
the lost ones. As hope faded, a deep and settled gloom stole over the
sorrowing parents, and reigned throughout the once cheerful and gladsome
homes. At the end of a week the only idea that remained was, that one
of these three casualties had befallen the lost children:--death, a
lingering death by famine; death, cruel and horrible, by wolves or
bears; or yet more terrible, with tortures by the hands of the dreaded
Indians, who occasionally held their councils and hunting parties on the
hills about the Rice Lake, which was known only by the elder Perron
as the scene of many bloody encounters between the rival tribes of the
Mohawks and Chippewas: its localities were scarcely ever visited by
our settlers, lest haply they should fall into the hands of the bloody
Mohawks, whose merciless dispositions made them in those days a by-word
even to the less cruel Chippewas and other Indian nations.

It was not in the direction of the Rice Lake that Maxwell and his
brother-in-law sought their lost children; and even if they had done so,
among the deep glens and hill passes of what is now commonly called
the Plains, they would have stood little chance of discovering the poor
wanderers. After many days of fatigue of body and distress of mind, the
sorrowing parents sadly relinquished the search as utterly hopeless,
and mourned in bitterness of spirit over the disastrous fate of their
first-born and beloved children.--"There was a voice of woe, and
lamentation, and great mourning; Rachel weeping for her children,
and refusing