It was on Sunday evening, the 18th of June, that we had the first intimation of what had been going on in those great shadows opposite to our house. I was sitting on the eastward porch,—which I said before gave a lookout toward the wood,—and had been sending up my quota of cloud to mingle with the fraternity of vapor around the setting sun (my pipe, my laboratory), when, as the shades grew purplish down in the ravine by the brook, I heard repeated shouts. When an ordinary stillness is violently broken, there follows a shock to the nervous system, repeated upon it by sympathy with the divinity of silence whose reign has been disturbed. Sometimes terror commences at once her frantic flight over all the barriers of reason; and again, anger beats back the blow with imprecation. But when the long-continued hush of a great forest, the mystic sleep of rocks and trees, of air itself pervading a radius of miles, is suddenly and sharply interrupted by that peculiar intonation of human outcry, which declares an event out of the ordinary train of circumstances, and when those outcries reach us out of thick concealment, wonder and dread assume control of our faculties, and make us pause almost in our breathing, to catch some other cry of different character by which we can determine the cause and nature of the first. I had heard from the paths and shades of those woods, during the summer, various kinds of human noises; but none of them ever reached the mad gamut of the one which had smitten the air but a moment since. Those other cries came from children, grown and ungrown, romping in happy energy along the glades,—from picnic parties calling to each other and replying as they separated after the feast of sandwiches,—and I had got to understand them all; but here was a yell that had in it the modulation of groan and spasm, uplifting of hands and straining of eyes, relaxing of muscles and whitening of faces, with stops put upon it by the fluttering pulses of the frightened heart; and imagining nothing of anything terrible that could have happened under that so pleasant roof of waving foliage, I sat paralyzed in the abruptness and terror of the interruption. But I was not kept long in such suspense. The news now came up from the dell that the body of the missing boy was found. The search of police and citizens had been conducted on the principle of an open fan with the handle held by the chief at the house where the children had been living. Thus the whole region on either side of the route known to have been taken by them was thoroughly gone over and examined, until the pursuit, almost despairing of success, reached the Bussey wood, expanded around the base of the hill, leaving no clump of bushes unexplored, until, upon that quiet Sabbath evening they found the poor boy lying dead in the midst of a thick screen of alder-bushes. Soon afterward the girl was discovered, but not, I believe, by parties actually engaged in the search.