Charleston, and with it was destroyed the library that had been the
pride of the poet's heart.

In this old home the Poet of the Pines was born of a family that
looked back to the opening days of the eighteenth century, when
Charleston was young, glowing with the beauty of her birth into the
forests of the New World, wearing proudly the tiara of her loyalty to
King and Crown. Looking back along the road that stretched between the
first Hayne, who helped to make of the old city a memory to be
cherished on the page of history and a picture on the canvas of the
present to awaken admiration, and the young soul that looked with
poetic vision on the beginning of the new era, one sees a long
succession of brilliant names and powerful figures.

Paul Hayne was the great-grand-nephew of "the Martyr Hayne," who has
given to Charleston her only authentic ghost-story, the scene of which
was a brick dwelling which stood till 1896 at the corner of Atlantic
and Meeting Streets. Colonel Isaac H. Hayne, a soldier of the
Revolution, secured a parole, that he might be with his dying wife.
While on parole he was ordered to fight against his country. Rather
than be forced to the crime of treason, he broke his parole, was
captured and condemned to death. From her beautiful, mahogany-panelled
drawing-room in that old home where the two streets cross, his
sister-in-law, who had gone with his two little children to plead for
his life, watched as he passed on his way from the vault of the old
Custom House, used then as a prison, to the gallows. "Return, return
to us!" she called in an agony of grief. As he walked on he replied,
"If I can I will." It is said that his old negro mammy, to whom he was
always "my chile," ran out to the gate with the playthings she had
fondly cherished since the days when they were to him irresistible