Two men unsuspectingly, perhaps unknowing of anything about the missing ones, strangers, it is to be supposed, and in the woods for a Sunday’s stroll, came upon a group of rocks lying a little off from the path at the southern terminus of the hill, and overlooking the common road of the county that leads to Dedham. Here, stretched in the rugged fissure of the rock, or rather in a basin at its base, lay the stabbed corpse of the sister. Another alarm, and the second part of the drama was concluded. IV. THE BROOK. So this much of the mystery was explained. These children had left their home a week before, purposing a little trip, that was to last only a few hours, to May’s wood, midway or thereabout between their starting-point and Bussey’s wood, where they were subsequently found dead. During all that week of vigorous and unwearied search by the police of Boston and Roxbury, joined in by that of the rural localities; while the sun shone so bright and peace seemed so perfect over and within that green glory, while hundreds of people as usual, suspecting nothing, came into and went out of old Bussey’s groves; these two dumb humanities lay,—the girl, with her poor fright-marked face towards the sky, appealing to it for testimony and redress, the brother prone to the earth by the sly little running stream, both stabbed over and over again,—for thirty-four times did that mad arm rise and fall,—their bodies rough with the clotted gore of their hideous wounds. The public stood awe-struck in the presence of this spectacle, and parents trembled when they saw such evidence of duty neglected in allowing these waifs to wander so far away from home. (Or were they accompanied, and by whom, when they went away?) For a time the junior members of families had to confine themselves to a more restricted sphere of locomotion, and the thought of murder haunting them drove them like curfew to their homes at dusk. The latitude heretofore extended to, or wrenched by, Young America underwent a revision, and the juvenile eagles and doves of the social roosts were forced to bend to the yoke of a new dispensation, the justification of which was found in the fate of those two hapless wanderers who had been found slaughtered in the woods of Bussey. Seldom, in the annals of crime, was there so great an excitement as was manifested, not only in Boston, but throughout the entire country, when the fate of the lost children was made known by the public press. In one week afterward the woods were daily crowded by people from the city and the suburbs, with parties from the distant towns, and I met one man, wandering about in a white state of nervousness, who said he had come from Maine to look at the localities. An artist of one of the New York illustrated papers, with whom I went over the woods, in company also with a policeman who had been detailed for the purpose of pointing out the spots to the man of wood-cuts, told me that in New York the murder of these children