for here, too, was the old theatre, gone long ago, where Fannie
Ellsler danced with a wavering, quivering, shimmering grace that drove
humming-birds to despair. In that theatre it may be that Paul Hayne
heard Jenny Lind fill the night with a melody which would irradiate
his soul throughout life and reproduce itself in the music-tones of
his gently cadenced verse. There the ill-fated Adrienne Lecouvreur
lived and died again in her wondrous transmigration into the soul of
the great Rachel.

When a boy, Hayne's heart may have often thrilled to the voice of the
scholarly Hugh Swinton Legare, as he made the heart of some classic
old poem live in the music of his organ-tones.

A sensitive soul surrounded by the influences of life in old
Charleston had many incentives to high and harmonious expression.

That the Queen City of the Sea did not claim the privilege of the
fickleness alleged to be incident to the feminine character is
illustrated by the fact that she had but two postmasters in seventy
years, a circumstance worthy of note "in days like these, when ev'ry
gate is thronged with suitors, all the markets overflow," and the
disbursing counter is crowded with claimants for the rewards due for
commendable activity in the campaign. One of those two was Peter
Bascot, an appointee of Washington. The other was Alfred Huger, "the
last of the Barons," who had refused to take the office in the time of
Bascot.

In old Charleston the servants were the severest sticklers for
propriety, and the butlers of the old families rivalled each other in
the loftiness of their standards. Jack, the butler of "the last of the