What wonder, then, that it should be believed that the bugles of the fast-coming Revolution have reached Nathaniel Bacon in his long sleep in the York River, where "thoughtful Mr. Lawrence" had sunk his gallant young body lest it meet with ignominy at the hands of Lord Berkeley; that Drummond and Carver, and Bland and Hansford, and all the grand spirits who, with their leader, had lived a hundred years too soon, should meet him now, to exult and triumph! 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."