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. CHAPTER VIII GOOD TIMES IN OLD VIRGINIA