CHAPTER V.
INCIDENTS AT SODUS BAY.
About this time two slaves who were laboring in the forest, instead of returning to their cabin as was expected, got lost, and wandered eight days in the dense forest without provision, except what they could procure from roots and the bark of trees.

Great exertion was made to find them; guns were fired, horns blown, and shouts raised, but all to no purpose.
Finally, we gave them up, supposing they had starved to death or had been killed by wild beasts.

One of them was an elderly man, named Benjamin Bristol, and the other, Edmund Watkins, a lad of about eighteen years of age.

They wandered in an easterly direction, a distance of some sixty or seventy miles, through an unbroken wilderness, vainly trying to find their way home.

On the eighth day, to their inexpressible joy, they came out on the shore of Lake Ontario, near Oswego; but young Watkins was so completely exhausted that he declared himself incapable of further exertion, and begged to be left to his fate.