He was lost in the edge of the Adirondack Wilderness. It must have been the sound of the flail. "Thud, thud, thud," came the beat of the dull, thumping strokes through the thick, opaque, gray fog. Willie was hardly four years old; and when once he was a few rods away from the barn, off on the plain of monotonous yellow stubble, he could not tell where he was, and could not detect the deceptive nature of the sound and its echo. He could see nothing: whichever way he looked, wherever he walked, there were the same reverberations; and the same narrow dome of watery gray was everywhere shutting close down around him. As he followed the muffled sound, in his efforts to get back to the barn, it seemed to retreat from him, and he ran faster to overtake it. He ran on and on, and so was lost.
   That night and the next day a few neighbors, gathered from the adjoining farms, searched for Willie. They wandered about the fields and the margin of the woods, but found no trace of the lost child. It became apparent that a general search must be made.

   The fog had cleared away on the second morning after Willie was lost, as about a hundred woodsmen and farmers and hunters, gathered from the farms and forest and settlement nearby, called Whiskey Hollow, stood and sat in grotesque groups around the little farmhouse and barn, waiting the grand organization into line, preparatory to sweeping the woods, and finding Willie.
   During all the hours of the two previous nights the lanterns and torches had been flashing in and out behind the logs and brush of the fallows; and the patches of snow that lingered in spite of the April rains gave evidence that every foot of the adjacent clearing had been trampled over in the search. But the men were not yet satisfied that the search about the farm had been thorough. Standing by the house, they could see the field of the night's work,--the level stubble of the grain-lot, and the broad, irregular hollow used as pasture, and filled with stumps and logs and brush. Here and there could be seen men still busy poking sticks under the logs, and working around bog-holes in the low ground. "You see it stands to reason," said Jim, addressing a group by the house, "that a little chap less than four years old could not get out of this clearing into the woods."
   A white-haired patriarch remarked, with great confidence and solemnity, "The boy is within half a mile of the house; and, if I can have command of six men, I will find him." The patriarch continued to press his suggestion until he secured his company and started off, feeling that he carried a great weight of responsibility. He joined the log-pokers and bog-explorers; but nothing came of his search.
    The morning was wearing away; the men, gathered from a great distance, were impatient of the delay to organize the line.
   Willie had been out nearly forty-eight hours. Could it be that he had passed beyond the stubble-field into the forest, nearly half a mile from the house? If he had managed to cross the brook at the edge of the woods, he had the vast Adirondack Wilderness before him. It was time to search thoroughly and upon a large scale, if the boy was to be found alive.

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