Mrs. Henry Martin tells me of some fearful days following the pleasant ones when her father, Professor Holmes, entertained the Old Guard in his garden among the roses and oleanders. "One night, my brother, after seeing a young lady home from a party, was returning along King Street with Mr. Evaugh, when they encountered a crowd of negro rowdies and ran into a store and under a counter. The negroes threw cobble-stones--the street was in process of paving--on them. My brother was brought home in a wagon. When our mother removed his shirt, the skin came wholly from his back with it; he lived several years, but never fully recovered from his injuries. My father cautioned us to stoop and crawl in passing the window on the stairway to his room. In other houses, people were stooping and crawling as they passed windows; a shadow on a curtain was a target for a rock or a bullet. Black women were in arms, carrying axes or hatchets in their hands hanging down at their sides, their aprons or dresses half-concealing the weapons." "There are 80,000 black men in the State who can use Winchesters and 200,000 black women who can light a torch and use a knife," said "Daddy Cain," ex-Congressman and candidate for reëlection, in his paper, "The Missionary Record," July, 1876, and in addressing a large negro gathering, when Rev. Mr. Adams said, "Amen!" Northern papers were full of the Hamburg and Ellenton riots, some blaming whites, some blacks, some distributing blame impartially. Facts at Cainhoy blazed out the truth about that place, at least. The whites, unarmed except for pistols which everybody carried then, were holding peaceable meeting when fired into from ambush by negroes with muskets, who chased them, continuing to fire. A youth of eighteen fell, with thirty-three buckshot in him; another, dying, wrote his mother that he had been giving no trouble. A carpenter and a shoemaker from Massachusetts, and an aged crippled gentleman were victims. "Kill them! Kill them all! Dis town is ours!" Old Charlestonians recall hearing a hoarse cry like this from negro throats (Sept. 6, 1876), recall seeing Mr. Milton Buckner killed while trying to protect negroes from negroes. They recall another night of unforgettable horror, when stillness was almost as awful as tumult; frightened blacks were in-doors, but how long would they remain so? Rifle Clubs were protecting a meeting of black Democrats. Not a footfall was heard on the streets; not a sound broke the stillness save the chiming of St. Michael's bells. Women and children and old men listened for the alarm that might ring out any moment that the negroes had risen _en masse_ for slaughter. They thanked God when presently a sound of careless footsteps, of talk and laughter, broke upon the night; the Rifle Club men were returning in peace to their firesides.