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 the settlers, lest haply they should
fall into the hands of the bloody Mohawks, whose merciless disposition
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