self a thousand times about the braes, and often upon errands to houses
two or three miles distant. What had her parents to fear? The footpaths
were all firm, and led to no places of danger, nor are infants themselves
incautious when alone in then pastimes. Lucy went singing into the low
woods, and singing she reappeared on the open hillside. With her small
white hand on the rail, she glided along the wooden bridge, or tripped
from stone to stone across the shallow streamlet.

2. The creature would be away for hours, and no fear be felt on her
account by anyone at home; whether she had gone, with her basket on her
arm, to borrow some articles of household use from a neighbor, or, merely
for her own solitary delight, had wandered off to the braes to play among
the flowers, coming back laden with wreaths and garlands.

3. The happy child had been invited to pass a whole day, from morning to
night, at Ladyside (a farmhouse about two miles off) with her playmates
the Maynes; and she left home about an hour after sunrise.

4. During her absence, the house was silent but happy, and, the evening
being now far advanced, Lucy was expected home every minute, and Michael,
Agnes, and Isabel, her father, mother, and aunt, went to meet her on the
way. They walked on and on, wondering a little, but in no degree alarmed
till they reached Ladyside, and heard the cheerful din of the children
within, still rioting at the close of the holiday. Jacob Mayne came to the
door, but, on their kindly asking why Lucy had not been sent home before
daylight was over, he looked painfully surprised, and said that she had
not been at Ladyside.

5. Within two hours, a hundred persons were traversing the hills in all
directions, even at a distance which it seemed most unlikely that poor
Lucy could have reached. The shepherds and their dogs, all the night
through, searched every nook, every stony and rocky place, every piece of
taller heather, every crevice that could conceal anything alive or dead:
but no Lucy was there.

6. Her mother, who for a while seemed inspired with supernatural strength,
had joined in the search, and with a quaking heart looked into every
brake, or stopped and listened to every shout and halloo reverberating
among the hills, intent to seize upon some tone of recognition or
discovery. But the moon sank; and then the stars, whose increased
brightness had for a short time supplied her place, all faded away; and
then came the gra