The building is small, of solid masonry, the walls two feet thick, pierced with loopholes for musketry. There is one door from which stone steps descend to an underground chamber. This is probably the first stone house ever built by the English colonists, and is generally conceded by historians and antiquarians to be the edifice of which in 1609 Anas Todkill and others wrote to the London Company, "We built a fort for a retreat neere a convenient river, upon a high commanding hill very hard to be assaulted and easie to be defended; but the want of corne occasioned the end of all our worke, it being worke enough to provide victuall." In this provision of "victuall," the starving colonists, as we have seen, were aided by Pocahontas, who brought, it is supposed, her "wild train" laden with baskets of food as far as this house, and there dismissing them, waited for Captain John Smith. The spot was favourable as a hiding-place from the fury of her father, the old king whose house was not far away, with its substantial chimney built by the treacherous Dutchmen. Here Pocahontas may have rested when she came "through the irksome woods with shining eyes" to warn her hero of danger and treachery from her own people. These are the bits of folk-lore gleaned by that patient and accurate historian, Charles Campbell. Sixty years ago he visited the Stone House, and verified the existence then in the minds of the common people of three distinct legends belonging to the locality. No one doubts the romantic attachment of the Indian princess to Captain Smith. It sprang into existence perhaps at the heroic moment when she shielded his doomed head with her own bosom, and became the dominant influence of her short and eventful life. Who can doubt that he early learned enough of her tongue to tell her of his mighty deeds, of the court of the great Sigismund, of his triumphal procession thither preceded by the heads, borne on lances, of the three slaughtered Turks; drawing, the while, pictures in the sand similar to the marvellous creations with which he illustrated the maps with which we are familiar? It is pathetic to know that the time was to him only an episode in a life of adventure. Even the saving of his own life, so often miraculously preserved, was a matter of little importance, remembered only in a generous moment, to secure for her an interest with his Queen. To Pocahontas he was more than a hero--he was little less than the Great Father himself. To him she was an attractive, beautiful child, and yet of a nation despised--"all savage," as he termed them.