one of that little circle ever lost the golden memory of those
magic evenings in the home of the novelist and poet, the thinker and
dreamer, William Gilmore Simms, the intellectual father of them all.

At that time in the old city was another picturesque home that harked
back to Colonial days--stately, veranda-circled, surrounded by that
fascinating atmosphere of history and poetry known to those old
dwellings alone of all the structures of the New World: the home of
the Southern poet of Nature, Paul Hamilton Hayne. Its many-windowed
front looked cheerfully out upon a wide lawn radiant with flowers of
bygone fashion, loved by the poets of olden times, and bright with the
greenery that kept perpetual summer around the historic dwelling. This
beautiful pre-Revolutionary home was burned in the bombardment of
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 w