asleep in this fashion when she should have been marching straight on! By the way, in which direction did she require to go? Straight on⁠—⁠but now she was not sure which direction was straight on, or which led back to Hunt’s Crossing. If by ill luck she took the wrong way darkness would overtake her, and she would have to ask for a night’s lodging at one of the three houses there. Even if she went forward on the right road she would still have difficulty in reaching Ripple by the time it grew dark, for now she was finding one foot very sore where her boot had rubbed it. She limped along the trail for a few hundred yards, gazing to right and left in a perfect fever of anxiety. There was forest on either side. Cedar, birch, beech, oak, and ash jostled each other, or stood singly or in groups, with wide stretches of lesser growth. It looked so exactly like the way she had been traversing before she went to sleep that after ten minutes or so Pam became convinced that she had turned round and was going back by the way she had come.

“Oh, I am in a hopeless muddle!” she murmured in a rueful tone, and turning back on her tracks she limped along as fast as she could go. Darkness dropped so suddenly on the forest that she was not prepared for its coming, and panic seized her in its grip. She could have screamed from sheer terror; but it was of no use to scream if there was no one to hear.

Suddenly a sound struck her ear⁠—⁠a sound of singing⁠—⁠voices in unison. Whatever could it be? Pam stood motionless in the middle of the trail, straining her ears to listen, while her heart beat so loudly that it seemed to stop her from catching the words that were sung. It was an old negro melody, and presently the words came to her through the clear air of the evening with quite startling distinctness:

Mother, rock me in the cradle all the day.

You may lay me down to sleep, my mother dear,

But rock me in the cradle all the day.

Pam had never heard anything like it before. The haunting sweetness of the melody, joined to the words, made her so fearfully home-sick that she had the greatest difficulty to keep from crying like a baby. But the singers were coming nearer, and her position of being lost on a straight trail was quite sufficiently ridiculous without her making herself look more absurd by being found in tears; so she stiffened her back and clenched her fists tightly.

Suddenly the singers changed their tune and broke into a rollicking, lilting melody:

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