A STRANGE STORY.
ITO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR") SIR,—I notice that the writer of the article in the Spectator of May 3rd entitled "A Strange Story" asks whether it is not a remarkable fact that the body of the poor child who was lost should have been found on the summit of the highest, and. presumably the most inaccessible, hill in the district. Ile goes on to say that the instinct of the man lost in a hilly
district is to go down, not up. "He knows that houses lie in valleys, not on summits. An intelligent child would reason in the same way." May I call to your recollection the touching episode of the lost child in Henry Kingsley's Australian novel, "Geoffrey Hamlyn " ? The shepherd's child, a boy of eight years old, strays away, and Sam Buckley and Cecil Mayfoid go in search of him with the dog 'Rover.' I quote from the book :—
" In a quarter of an hour from starting they found, slightly up the stream, one of the child's socks. . . . . Here brave Rover, took up the trail like a bloodhound, and before evening stopped at the foot of a lofty cliff. Can he have gone up here,' said Sam, as they were brought up by the rock?' Most likely,' said Cecil. 'Lost children always climb from height to height. I have often heard it remarked by old bush hands. Why they do so, God, who leads them, only knows ; but the fact is beyond denial. Ask
Rover what he thinks.' The dog, with his nose to the ground, led them slowly along the rocky rib of the mountain, ever going higher and higher. 'It is inconceivable,' said Sam, that the poor child can have come up here. There is Tuckerimbid close to our right, 5,000 feet above the river. Don't you think that we must be mistaken ? ' "
A few yards farther they find the child's dead body. Kingsley adds a note :—
" The author of this book knew a child, who, being lost by his father out shooting on one of the data bordering the Eastern Pyrenees in Port Phillip, on a Sunday afternoon, was found on the Wednesday following dead, at an elevation above the Avoca town- ship of between two and three thousand feet."
Even grown men who have lost their way in a forest have been seized with a desire to get upon an eminence to see
where they are, or to believe in the face of all reason that there is an obstacle between them and home which they must surmount. I think that this latter feeling would seize a child's imagination. You may remember that a year or two ago another child was also lost in Wales, and that his body was found on the top of a mountain. These facts seem to bear out Henry Kingsley's view, which it may be as well to keep in mind, should any more poor children go astray.—I am,
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