The cave existed; and it was inhabited by men who came and went on mysterious errands, and transacted their business by night. What this band of adventurers or desperadoes lived on, how they conveyed their food through the trackless woods to their high eyrie, and what could induce men to seek suck a retreat, were questions discussed, but never settled. They might be banditti; but there was nothing to plunder in these savage wilds, and, in fact, robberies and raids, either in the settlements of the hills or the distant lake shores were unknown. In another age, these might have been hermits, holy men who had retired from the world to feed the vanity of their godliness in a spot where they were subject neither to interruption nor comparison; they would have had a shrine in the cave, and an image of the Blessed Virgin, with a lamp always burning before it and sending out its mellow light over the savage waste. A more probable notion was that they were romantic Frenchmen who had grown weary of vice and refinement together,—possibly princes, expectants of the throne, Bourbon remainders, named Williams or otherwise, unhatched eggs, so to speak, of kings, who had withdrawn out of observation to wait for the next turn-over in Paris. Frenchmen do such things. If they were not Frenchmen, they might be horse-thieves or criminals, escaped from justice or from the friendly state-prison of New York. This last supposition was, however, more violent than the others, or seems so to us in this day of grace. For what well-brought-up New York criminal would be so insane as to run away from his political friends the keepers, from the easily-had companionship of his pals outside, and from the society of his criminal lawyer, and, in short, to put
