unmolested, but oftener his days were full of anxiety and danger.
Indeed, history tells of many a time when the settler, after leaving
home in the morning in search of game for his happy household would
return at night to find his family murdered or carried away and his
cabin a mass of smoking ruins. Only in the comparatively crowded
settlements, where strength was in numbers, could the white inhabitants
hope for security--though bought at the price of constant vigilance and
precaution.

In one of these settlements, where a few neatly whitewashed cabins, and
rougher log huts, clustered on the banks of a bend in the Ohio River,
dwelt a man named Hedden, with his wife and three children. His farm
stretched further into the wilderness than his neighbors', for his had
been one of the first cabins built there, and his axe, ringing merrily
through the long days, had hewn down an opening in the forest, afterward
famous in that locality as "Neighbor Hedden's Clearing." Here he had
planted and gathered his crops year after year, and in spite of
annoyances from the Indians, who robbed his fields, and from bears, who
sometimes visited his farm stock, his family had lived in security so
long that, as the settlement grew, his wife sang at her work, and his
little ones shouted at their play as merrily as though New York or
Boston were within a stone's throw. To be sure, the children were bidden
never to stray far from home, especially at nightfall; and the crack of
rifles ringing now and then through the forest paled their cheeks for
an instant, as the thought of some shaggy bear, furious in his death
agony, crossed their minds.

Sometimes, too, the children would whisper together of the fate of poor
Annie Green, who, a few years before had been found killed in the
forest; or their mother would tell them with pale lips of the night when