Ducking-stool.
Stories were told around the fireside on winter nights, when the wooden shutters rattled—for rarely before 1720 were "windows sasht with crystal glass." The express, bringing mails from the north, had been scalped by Indians. Four times in one year had homeward-bound ships been sunk by pirates. Men, returning to England to receive an inheritance, were waylaid on the high seas, robbed, and murdered. In Virginia waters the dreaded "Blackbeard" had it all his own way for a while. Finally, his grim head is brought home on the bowsprit of a Virginia ship, and a drinking-cup, rimmed with silver, made of the skull that held his wicked brains. Of course, it could not be expected that he could rest in his grave under these circumstances, and so, until fifty years ago (when possibly the drinking-cup was reclaimed by his restless spirit), his phantom sloop might be seen spreading its ghostly sails in the moonlight on the York River and putting into Ware Creek to hide ill-gotten gains in the Old Stone House. Only a few years before had the dreadful Tuscaroras risen with fire and tomahawk in the neighbor colony of North Carolina.
The Old Stone House.
Nearer home, in her own neighborhood, in fact, were many suggestive localities which a child's fears might people with supernatural spirits. Although there were no haunted castles with dungeon, moat, and tower, there were deserted houses in lonely places, with open windows like hollow eyes, graveyards half hidden by tangled creepers and wept over by ancient willows. About these there sometimes hung a mysterious, fitful light which little Mary, when a belated traveller in the family coach, passed with bated breath, lest warlocks or witches should issue therefrom, to say nothing of the interminable stretches of dark forests, skirting ravines fringed with poisonous vines, and haunted by the deadly rattlesnake. People talked of strange, unreal lights peeping through the tiny port-holes of the old Stone House on York River—that mysterious fortress believed to have been built by John Smith—while, flitting across the doorway, had been seen the dusky form of Pocahontas, clad in her buckskin robe, with a white plume in her hair: keeping tryst, doubtless, with Captain Smith, with none to hinder, now that the dull, puritanic John Rolfe was dead and buried; and, as we have said, Blackbeard's sloop would come glimmering down the river, and the bloody horror of a headless body would land and wend its way to the little fortress which held his stolen treasure. Moreover, Nathaniel Bacon had risen from his grave in York River, and been seen in the Stone House with his compatriots, Drummond, Bland, and Hansford.
Doubtless such stories inspired many of little Mary's early dreams, and caused her to tremble as she lay in her trundle-bed,—kept all day beneath the great four poster, and drawn out at night,—unless, indeed, her loving mother allowed her to climb the four steps leading to the feather sanctuary behind the heavy curtains, and held her safe and warm in her own bosom.