What matter, now, that they had bled and suffered, and laid down their bright young lives, so full of promise, for a "lost cause"! The cause had lived, and soon the young republic would break its shackles and stand forth with its foot upon the tyrant's neck. The mills of the gods had not been idle, and here in the mysterious Old Stone House, the fortress in which no living man had ever dwelt, they met to plan, to rejoice, to triumph, night after night, until the foes of the country they loved so well should be driven from her shores in disgrace and defeat.
These are the legends—if they are not too recent to be classed as legends—with which, a century ago, Virginians dignified the Old Stone House. The early settlers were firm believers in supernatural influences and warnings. A blazing star had appeared before a storm when the three ships set forth to find this country, another in the year of the massacre of 1622, and yet another on the eve of Bacon's Rebellion. Tongue-like flames flitted to and fro over the early graveyards, and ghostly lights hovered over the undrained marshes. The "boat of birchen bark" lighted by a firefly lamp of the lost lovers in the Dismal Swamp was seen as late as the nineteenth century. Huntsmen in the cold, freezing nights would sometimes find themselves suddenly enveloped in a warm cloud,—this was because a ghost had met them and passed over them in the dark. Sterner than all these was the belief that witches—malignant spirits—were suffered to enter human bodies and bend men and women to their evil purposes.
Ghost stories have long been out of fashion. They have no longer a place in literature or even beside the winter fireside. The American of to-day may be a dreamer of dreams and seer of visions, but they are of the future, not the past. His phantoms are all ahead of him. Perhaps I should apologise for admitting them into a serious work. And yet I think that everything connected with the story of the birth of our nation deserves preservation. I believe, with Carlyle, that "the leafy, blossoming Present Time springs from the whole Past, remembered and unrememberable."
As Time goes on and touches with effacing finger one and another of the events that have marked, like milestones, the onward march of the great Anglo-Saxon race, we may be sure that the birth of this Western nation will ever be "remembered." "We shall not," said Daniel Webster, "stand unmoved on the shore of Plymouth while the sea continues to wash it, nor will our brethren in another early and ancient colony forget the place of its first establishment till their river ceases to flow by it. No vigour of youth, no maturity of manhood, will lead the nation to forget the spots where its infancy was cradled and defended."
FOOTNOTES
[1] Hume's "James I," p. 83
[2] Hakluyt, III, 174-176.
[3] Stith's "History," p. 25.
[4] Coke, 2 Inst. 729 and 734.
[5] Harleian MS., quoted by Miss Aiken in her "Memoirs of the Court of James I."