What Winter says is that, 'near to Easter ... opportunity was given to hire the cellar, in which we resolved to lay the powder and leave the mine.' What single word is there here about the conspirators thinking that there was no storey intervening between the foundation and the House of Lords? The mere fact of Percy having been in the house close to the passage from which there was an opening closed only by a grating into the 'cellar' itself,[177] would negative the impossible supposition. Father Gerard, however, adds that Mrs. Whynniard tells us that the cellar was not to let, and that Bright, _i.e._ Mrs. Skinner, had not the disposal of the lease, but one Skinner, and that Percy 'laboured very earnestly before he succeeded in obtaining it.' What Mrs. Whynniard says is that the cellar had been already let, and that her husband had not the disposal of it. Percy then 'intreated that if he could get Mrs. Skinner's good-will therein, they would then be contented to let him have it, whereto they granted it.'[178] Is not this exactly what one might expect to happen on an application for a lease held by a tenant who proves willing to remove? Father Gerard proceeds to raise difficulties from the structural nature of the cellar itself. Mr. William Capon, he says, examined the foundations of the House of Lords when it was removed in 1823, and did not discover the hole which the conspirators were alleged to have made. His own statement, however, printed in the fifth volume of _Vetusta Monumenta_,[179] says nothing about the foundations; and besides, as Father Gerard has shown, he had a totally erroneous theory of the place whence he supposes the conspirators to have had access to the 'cellar.' Nothing--as I have learnt by experience--is so likely as a false theory to blind the eyes to existing evidence. Then we have remarks upon the mode of communication between Percy's house and the cellar. Father Gerard tells us that:-- "Fawkes says (November 6th, 1605) that about the middle of Lent[180] of that year, Percy caused 'a new door' to be made into it, that he might have a nearer way out of his own house into the cellar. "This seems to imply that Percy took the cellar for his firewood when there was no convenient communication between it and his house. Moreover, it is not very easy to understand how a tenant--under such conditions as his--was allowed at discretion to knock doors through the walls of a royal palace. Neither did the landlady say anything of this door-making, when detailing what she knew of Percy's proceedings." Without perceiving it, Father Gerard proceeds to dispose of the objection he had raised.