On a sunny afternoon in summer Mr. Keyes and his boys were in the field some distance from the house, picking up logs and burning them with the stumps and brush, to enlarge the farm. Around the house were fields of corn and flax and waving grain. The cows and sheep were browsing in the edge of the woods. Mrs. Keyes was spinning flax in front of the cabin door, seated on a low, home-made stool upon the hard and smoothly swept ground. Within, the neatly kept log cabin had a rough floor strewn with white sand. On one side of the single large room there was a settee stuffed with shavings of birch-bark; and a cat lay curled up and dozing in the sun, which streamed in through the open lattice that took the place of a window. Around the room were the rough tables and the benches which used to serve as furniture in such primitive dwellings. Shelves and cupboards were fastened upon the wall. Dried apples and pumpkins, pieces of venison and smoked ham, hung upon poles at the top of the room. The wide fireplace and large, open chimney stood at one side. The embers smouldered between the great andirons, ready to be kindled for preparing the evening meal. Aloft, and reached by a ladder that rested against an opening, was the chamber where the family used to sleep. This was the happy home of Robert Keyes, where comfort and busy contentment reigned. On the afternoon in question two older daughters were at play with little Lucy under the trellis of hop-vines that shaded their mother from the sun. Those were not the days of carpets or of painted floors. Neat housewives would sprinkle the boards with clean white sand; and this, under the tread of feet, would scour the wood and then be swept away. The brooms were made by stripping the sapling birch and tying these strips in a bundle over the end of the stick, or by tying cedar or hemlock boughs at the end of a pointed handle. Housekeepers were unacquainted with boughten brushes and corn-brooms and sweeping-machines. At their mother's call the two older girls started with a bucket to go to the shore of the lake to fetch some sand for the floor. Little Lucy, thus left alone, soon tired of her play, and wandered away among the vines and the corn around the door, till she came to the path that led to the lake. She followed her sisters a long way behind them, and was never again seen by her friends.