ighty,--but see!"--passing over his knee
the cord with which Bythewood had been bound. "This is the chain with
which you bind my brothers and sisters. It is strong. You have drawn it
very tight about them. But you thought to draw it tighter still, to hold
them fast forever; and look, you have broken it!"

So saying, he displayed with a smile the two fragments of the rope that
had snapped like a mere string in his hands.

"So tyranny is made to defeat itself!"--trampling the ends under his
feet. "I have said it. Remember!"

Uttering these last words, he walked backwards slowly, resumed his rifle
and lantern, and disappeared in the dark recesses of the cave. The freed
prisoners then, joining Pepperill, took their way slowly down the
mountain, sadder if not wiser men.

The reappearance of Bythewood was a signal for sending immediately two
full companies to capture the cave. They succeeded; but they captured
nothing else. Pomp, escaping through the sink, was already miles away on
the trail of the refugees.

* * * * *

Thus ends the story of Cudjo's Cave. Other conclusion, to give it
dramatic completeness, it ought, perhaps, to have; but the struggles, of
which we have here witnessed the beginning, have not yet ended [Nov.,
1863]; and one can scarcely be expected to describe events before they
transpire.

We may add, however, that Mr. Villars, Virginia, and Toby, arrived
safely at their destination,--a small town on the borders of
Ohio,--where they were cordially welcomed by relatives of the family.
There, three weeks later, they were visited by two very suspicious
looking characters,--one a bronzed and bearded young man, robust, rough,
with an eye like an eagle's gleaming from under his old slouched hat,
whom nobody, I am sure, would ever have taken for a Quaker schoolmaster;
the other a stout, ruddy, blue-eyed, laughing, ragged lad of sixteen,
who certainly did not pass for a rebel deserter. Strange to say, these
pilgrims of the dusty roads and rocky wildernesses were welcomed (not to
speak it profanely) like angels from heaven by the old man, his
daughter, and Toby,--their brown hands shaken, their coarse, torn
clothes embraced, and their sunburnt faces kissed, with a rapture
amazing to strangers of the household. They were travelling (as the
younger remarked in an accent which betrayed his Teutonic origin) to
"Pennsylwany," the home of the elder; and they had come thus far out of
t