While the fugitives lived in this den, they were regularly supplied with daily bread and other necessaries of life, by a woodman, who lived at the foot of the rock. A child came up the mountain daily with a supply of provisions, which he left on a certain stone, and returned without seeing any body, or asking any questions of Echo. In this way he always brought a full basket and took back an empty one, without the least suspicion that he was becoming an accessory in high treason, and, as it is said, without ever knowing to whom, or for what, he was ministering. As a Brahmin sets rice before an idol, so the little one fed the stone, or left the basket to "the unseen spirit of the wood;" and well it was that the little Red-riding-hood escaped the usual fate of all lonely little foresters, for it seems there were mouths and maws in the mountain which cheesecakes would not have satisfied. The dwellers in the rock had a terrible fright one night from the visit of some indescribable beast--a panther, or something worse--that blazed its horrid eyes into their dark hole, and growled so frightfully, that if all the bailiffs of London had surrounded their den, they would have been less alarmed. It seemed some motherly tigress in search of her cubs, and when she discovered the intruders, she set up such an ululation of maternal grief as made every aisle of the forest ring again, and so scared the inmates of her den, that, as soon as they dared, they took to their heels down the mountain, ready to hear any hue and cry on their track, rather than hers. This story was told us by our guide, who gave it as the reason for their final desertion of the place. On the stone which I climbed, I found engraven a great number of names and initials, with dates of different years. Apparently they had been left there by visiters from the university. In more than one place, some ardent youth, in his first love with democracy, had taken pains to renew the inscription, which tradition says Goffe and Whalley placed over their retreat. "Opposition to tyrants is obedience to God." I suppose there will always be fresh men to do Old Mortality's office for this inscription, for the maxim is one which has long been popular in America among patriotic declaimers. How long it will continue generally popular, may indeed be doubted, since the abolitionists have lately adopted it, and in their mouths it becomes an incendiary watchword, which the supporters of slavery have no little reason to dread. I myself saw this motto on an anti-slavery placard set up in the streets of New York.