To make matters worse Polly Mathers was treating him with marked indifference, and openly bestowing her smiles upon Mattison; what the trouble was I could only conjecture, but I feared that she too had been hearing rumors.
The ha'nt stories had been repeated and exaggerated until they contained no semblance of truth.

By this time, not only the laurel walk was haunted, but the spring-hole as well; and it soon became a region of even greater fear than the deserted cabins.

The "spring-hole" was a natural cavity in the side of a hill a half mile or so back from the house.

It was out of this cavity that the underground stream flowed which fed the pools, and furnished such valuable irrigation to the place.

All that part of Virginia is undermined with limestone caverns, and my uncle's was by no means the only plantation that could boast the distinction of a private cave.