The University was opened in March, 1825. Forty students were in attendance, though at the beginning of the second year the number was increased to one hundred and seventy-seven. The central feature of the collection of buildings, the wonderful Rotunda, was badly injured in the fire of 1895 which destroyed the Annex. The Rotunda was soon rebuilt according to Jefferson's original plan, and the group of buildings is more beautiful than ever. SEVEN: THROUGH THE SUNNY SOUTH _The long, grey moss that softly swings In solemn grandeur from the trees, Like mournful funeral draperies,-- A brown-winged bird that never sings._ ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE. _O Magnet-South! O glistening perfumed South! my South! O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse and love! good and evil! O all dear to me! O dear to me my birth-things--all moving things and the trees where I was born--the grains, plants, rivers, Dear to me my own slow sluggish rivers where they flow, distant, over flats of silvery sands or through swamps._ _O the cotton plant! the growing fields of rice, sugar, hemp! The cactus guarded with thorns, the laurel-tree with large white flowers, The range afar, the richness and barrenness, the old woods charged with mistletoe and trailing moss, The piney odor and the gloom, the awful natural stillness (here in these dense swamps the freebooter carries his gun, and the fugitive has his conceal'd hut;)_ The mocking bird, the American mimic, singing all the forenoon, singing through the moonlit night, The humming bird, the wild turkey, the raccoon, the opossum; A Kentucky corn-field, the tall, graceful, long-leav'd corn, slender, flapping, bright green, with tassels, with beautiful ears each well-sheath'd in its husk; O my heart! O tender and fierce pangs, I can stand them not, I will depart; O to be a Virginian where I grew up! O to be a Carolinian! O longings irrepressible! O I will go back to old Tennessee and never wander more. WALT WHITMAN. SEVEN: THROUGH THE SUNNY SOUTH LXXV THREE OLD CHURCHES IN CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA ST. MICHAEL'S, ST. PHILIP'S, AND THE HUGUENOT CHURCH, RELICS OF COLONIAL DAYS The oldest church building in Charleston, South Carolina, St. Michael's Protestant Episcopal Church, is a relic of three wars. At the beginning of the Revolution the rector and the vestry disagreed; the rector was a loyalist and most of the members were patriots. Accordingly the rector resigned. Later the beautiful tower, which is unlike any other church tower in America, was painted black, lest it become a guiding beacon to the British fleet. Unfortunately the black tower against the blue sky proved a better guide than a white tower would have been.