The New Bloomfield, Pa. times. (New Bloomfield, Pa.) 1877-188?, 1877-01-23
Lost in the Bush.

A STORY comes to us by the Australian
"A mail which will fill many a moth
er's eyes with tears, and touch the stern
er hearts of all those true men who love
little children and are tender to them.
The colony was ringing with it when
the steamer came away, to the temporary
forgetfulness of gold fields and railways,
of general elections, and the fight be-
tween Victoria and New South Wales
about the river Murray. Years hence,
probably it will get into ballad, and be
"sung or said'' to the tiny Australian
generations to come, like the "children
in the Wood" to their small cousins at
home.
Its heroes are three little people-two
brothers and a sister-of whom the eldest
boy was nine, and the youngest five, the
girl being seven years of age. They were
children of a carpenter named Duff, who
worked at a sheep station near a place
called Horsham. In Australia small
hands can help; so these three babes
used to be sent after brush-wood for
brooms and fires. They had gone dozens
of times, and had come back safely; but
this once, when their mother sent them,
they wandered into the bush, and
missed their way, and at night there
were their little cots empty, and their
little plates of supper getting cold, but
no children. "Lost in the bush ~
Think what that means for an Austria
liam mother-when vigorous men have
sometimes wandered but hundred yards
from the track in those labyrinth of
gum-trees and wattles, and goes hope
lessly forward and backward and back
ward and forward, till they have laid
themselves down to die. OF course
there was a search for them, all night,
and day, many nights and many days,
and every hour of the weary time steal
ing the hope slowly out of the hearts of
the father and mother.
Atla they did what ought to have
been done before-they called the instinct
of the savage to help them find at least
the corpses of the wanderers. Nobody can
explain that instinct; everybody who
has hunted or travelled with wild tribes
has witnessed it. The face of the ground
to them is like leaf of a book to us
they read it.. One of the Australian
blacks will tell you if kangaroo has
crossed creek by the displacement of
= hlsx,Ifol1 htxD, nd hxiy,ff IA I'm,
into the thick of the eucalyptuses, he
will point to his "gunya" miles away !;
it is the sixth sense of races brought up
in life that could not exist on five.
The blacks soon found the trail of the
poor little three; and to find one end for
them was to be sure of the other. "They
would be dead, alas !" but it was some
thing to have their pretty bodies away
from the crows, the buzzards and the
.dingoes. So father and mother and
friends, on the eight day after the loss,
followed the native trackers step by step.
"Here littlest one tired-look, sit down."
says one black bloodhound; and present
Ely another grunts-"Bigo one carry-see,
travel in dark-tumble into this brush. I"
Father on still, the keenest of the pack
finds the mark where "little one put
down too tired''--and thus they search
every nook, corner, bush, and thicket
until at last they are rewarded. The
little ones are found lying asleep in each
others arms, not with the robins cover
ing them with leaves, but in the hut of
a bushman who had kindly cared for
them. r f liza