usual, dressed my feet again, sat on a log and ate some corn and forced down some meat. Just as I finished my lonely meal, a flock of ducks flew off the lake, and soon a crane followed them. This was proof that something had disturbed them, and, fearing that Indians were close at hand, I hid behind a tree, and watched the road in the direction I had just come. Presently the head of a horse was seen to rise over the hill near by. “Indians, without doubt,” thought I, and shrank down among the bushes, and watched to see a dozen or more of the hated savages file along before me. But, oh! what a revulsion of feeling, from fear to joy! It proved to be the mail-carrier from Sioux Falls to New Ulm. I crept out of the brush, and addressed him. He stopped his horse, and, staring me in the utmost astonishment, asked, in the Indian tongue, if I were a squaw. I answered yes, not understanding him, and told him the Indians had killed all the white people at the lake. “Why,” said he, “you look too white to be a squaw.” “I am no squaw,” replied I, “I am Mrs. Eastlick; you have seen me several times at Mrs. Everett’s house; but I am very badly wounded.” While talking with him, the first tears I had yet shed, since the beginning of my troubles, began to pour like rain over my cheeks. While I was alone, without an earthly friend to listen to my grief, I bore up stoically; but now the warmth of human sympathy unlocked the frozen current of my tears, and I tried with joy, at once more beholding the face of a white man. He then inquired about the extent of my wounds, and asked to see them; so I turned up my sleeve, and showed him my wounded arm, and the place where my head was broken. He then helped me up on his sulky, and walked along, leading the horse. At about four o’clock we came in sight of “Dutch Charley’s,” when we drove the horse away from the road into a ravine, helped me to the ground, telling me to conceal myself in the grass, and he would go to the house and see if there had been any Indians about. He returned presently, saying there had been none there: that the family had deserted the premises, but that there was an old man there, who came from Lake Shetak. He helped me to mount the sulky again, and we were soon before the door. As soon as I had got to the ground, the man made his appearance at the door, and, wonderful to tell, it was poor “Uncle Tommy Ireland.” I hardly knew him, for he looked more like a corpse than a living being; his face was pale, his eyes deeply sunk, and his voice reduced to a whisper. I hurried to greet him, rejoiced to find, still living, my old friend and neighbor, who had witnessed the same heart-ending sights with myself. He clasped his arm around me, kissed me several times, and we both wept like children at the sight of each other.