well, some
fifteen or twenty feet deep. At the bottom, arched doorways on opposite
sides of the shaft opened into two small square rooms. The walls of the
well and of the rooms were cement; and the floors were paved with
brick. A round stone table used to stand in one of the rooms. From this
well once ran two passages or tunnels, large enough for people to go
through; one connecting with the house by a curious stairway in the old
wing that was destroyed in the war, and the other leading to the river.

We stood looking blankly at the closed outbuilding trying to imagine
the hidden rooms and passages beneath it. Tradition told us that they
were for refuge from the Indians. That explanation seemed well enough
at first. But before we could get into the spirit of it enough to catch
even the faintest bit of a warwhoop and to scuttle for the subterranean
chambers, we made up our minds that that was not what the things were
for anyway. There had ceased to be much danger from Indians along that
part of the James by the time even this old home at Westover was built.

So, casting about for a better explanation, we hit upon the idea that
William Byrd had constructed the underground rooms in imitation of
Pope's famous grotto, which the Colonel and his daughter Evelyn must
have seen when entertained by the poet in his villa at Twickenham. But
even after we had pictured the mysterious chambers all hung round with
mirrors, just like Pope's, and candles everywhere, we could see that so
tame a thing as the grotto theory would never do.

There were so many nice, awful things that such a place would be good
for. Spurring our jaded fancy with bits from Ali Baba and the Forty
Thieves, we got on famously for a while with a pirates' den. We had a
long, low, rakish ship lying in the river just off the tunnel's mouth;
black-bearded ruffians, with knives between their teeth, stealing
ashore and disappearing within the dark underground passage; the great
stone table down there heaped with Spanish gold; good Jamaica rum
pouring down wicked throats; the dark tunnels ever echoing the
rollicking chorus, "Six men sat on the dead man's chest"--when suddenly
it occurred to us that we were somewhat compromising the old colonial
grandee, Colonel Byrd. With that we gave the matter up. We quit staring
at a closed brick outbuilding with unseeable things down under it, and
went on our way. And, as it turned out that we never visited the
underground rooms aft