unsteady on his feet; his guardians followed him and joined with
the group in a busy serious talk that lasted perhaps five minutes--but
vastly longer to the women who watched them from above. Then Penrhyn and
two men went hastily down the hill, and the others came up to the crib
and eagerly accepted the offer of a hasty breakfast.

They had little to tell, and that little only served to deepen the doubt
and trouble of the hour. Of all the complication of unkind chance the
searchers had to face the worst and the most puzzling. As in many towns
of old settlement a road ran around the town, roughly circumscribing it,
much as the boulevards of Paris anciently circumscribed the old
fortifications of the city. It was little more than a haphazard
connection of roads, lanes, and avenues, each one of which had come into
existence to serve some particular end, and the connection had ended in
forming a circuit that practically defined the town limits. It had been
made certain that the boy had wandered this whole round, and that he had
not left it by any one of the converging roads which he must have
crossed. Nor could the direction of his wandering be ascertained. The
hard, dry macadam road, washed clean by a recent rainfall, showed no
trace of his light, infantile footprints. But sure it was that he had
been on the road not one hour, but two or three at least, and that he
had started out with an armful of his tiny belongings. Here they had
found his small pocket-handkerchief, there a gray giraffe from his
Noah's ark; in another place a noseless doll that had descended to him
from his eldest sister; then a top had been found--a top that he could
not have spun for years to come. Would the years ever come when that
lost boy should spin tops?

There were other little signs which attested his passage around the
circle--freshly broken stalks of milkweed, shreds of his brightly
figured cotton dress on the thorns of the wayside blackberries, and even
in one place the clear print of a muddy and bloody little hand on a
white gate-post.

There is no search more difficult than a search for a lost child five or
six years of age. We are apt to think of these wee ones as feeble
creatures, and we forget that their physical strength is proportionally
much greater than that of grown-up people. We forget also that the child
has not learned to attribute sensations of physical discomfort to their
proper sources. The child knows that it suffers, bu