Carolina, for safe-keeping. But Columbia was, as matters turned out, the
worst place to which they could have been sent. The silver was looted by
troops under Sherman, and the bells were destroyed when the city was
burned. The fragments were, however, collected and sent to England,
whence the bells originally came, and there they were recast. Their
music--perhaps the most characteristic of all the city's characteristic
sounds--has been called "the voice of Charleston." Of the silver only a
few fragments have been returned. One piece was found in a pawn shop in
New York, and another in a small town in Ohio. _Mais que voulez-vous?
C'est la guerre!_

In mentioning Charleston churches one becomes involved in a large
matter. In 1801, when St. Mary's, the first Roman Catholic church in the
city, was erected, there were already eighteen churches in existence,
among them the present Huguenot Church, at the corner of Church and
Queen Streets, which, though a very old building, is nevertheless the
second Huguenot Church to occupy the same site, the first, built in
1687, having been destroyed in the great conflagration of 1796, which
very nearly destroyed St. Philip's, as well. A number of the old
Huguenot families long ago became Episcopalians, and the descendants of
many of the early French settlers of Charleston, buried in the Huguenot
churchyard, are now parishioners of St. Michael's and St. Philip's. The
Huguenot Church in Charleston is the only church of this denomination in
America; its liturgy is translated from the French, and services are
held in French on the third Sunday of November, January and March. A
Unitarian Church was established in 1817, as an offshoot of the Scotch
Presbyterian Church, the old White Meeting House of which (built 1685,
used by the British as a granary, during the Revolution, and torn down
1806) gave Meeting Street its name. Early in the history of the
Unitarian Church, the home of which was a former Presbyterian Church