when seized and put to the torture that she might disclose the secrets
of the conspirators, fearing that the weakness of her frame might
overpower her resolution, actually bit off her tongue, that she might be
unable to betray the trust placed in her. The Athenians commemorated her
truly golden silence by raising in her honor the statue of a lioness
without a tongue, in allusion to her name, which signifies a lioness.

Again, Rome had a tradition of a lady whose mother was in prison under
sentence of death by hunger, but who, at the peril of her own life,
visited her daily, and fed her from her own bosom, until even the stern
senate were moved with pity, and granted a pardon. The same story is
told of a Greek lady, called Euphrasia, who thus nourished her father;
and in Scotland, in 1401, when the unhappy heir of the kingdom, David,
Duke of Rothesay, had been thrown into the dungeon of Falkland Castle by
his barbarous uncle, the Duke of Albany, there to be starved to death,
his only helper was one poor peasant woman, who, undeterred by fear of
the savage men that guarded the castle, crept, at every safe
opportunity, to the grated window on a level with the ground, and
dropped cakes through it to the prisoner, while she allayed his thirst
from her own breast through a pipe. Alas! the visits were detected, and
the Christian prince had less mercy than the heathen senate. Another
woman, in 1450, when Sir Gilles of Brittany was savagely imprisoned and
starved in much the same manner by his brother, Duke François, sustained
him for several days by bringing wheat in her veil, and dropping it
through the grated window, and when poison had been used to hasten his
death, she brought a priest to the grating to enable him to make his
peace with Heaven. Tender pity made these women venture all things; and
surely their doings were full of the gold of love.

So again two Swiss lads, whose father was dangerously ill, found that