my Tommy's bones!" The sad little relics had been discovered by a neighbour in a thicket but three quarters of a mile from the child's home, and the father must, as he said, have often passed within a few yards of the very spot. The body appeared to have been devoured by either pigs or wild dogs, and the tokens were few to identify, but a part of a little boot, and some scraps of a plaid frock, enabled the poor parents to recognize the remains as those of their lost darling.
The same causes which render so difficult the finding of anyone who has been lost in the bush, help much to facilitate the occurrence of such catastrophes. The scenery possesses sufficient variety to please the eye but no strikingly distinctive features to remind a person that he has wandered from the way, or to help him to regain it. The trees shut out the distant view and seem to be endlessly repeated, and if the traveller fares along, either thinking of nothing, or too much absorbed in meditation to pay attention to the road, one quarter of a mile's aberration may place him in circumstances which, for utter loneliness and forlorn destitution, can find no parallel excepting on a raft at sea.
Those who retain their presence of mind when they find themselves going wrong, and who have the gift of what phrenologists call "locality," will generally be able by observing the sun or stars to strike into a right direction, and it was thus that a good Irish neighbour of ours contrived to return safely to the company of her fellow-creatures, after losing her way for six hours in an attempt to convey her husband's dinner to him in the bush. The purpose of her errand shows how short a distance is quite
