FROM A PAINTING BY COL. J. TRUMBULL.] Disastrous fires have destroyed many of the historic landmarks of the town, and the most interesting public building still standing is the Colonial Exchange, built in 1771, at a cost of £41,470. In its basement Colonel Isaac Hayne and other patriot prisoners were confined, and here General Moultrie walled up one hundred thousand pounds of gunpowder, which remained undiscovered during the three years that the British held the town. It was the scene of a ball and public reception in honor of General Washington when he visited Charleston after the Revolution, and was used as the Post Office from 1783 until the construction of the new granite Post Office, in Italian Renaissance style, during the last decade. Of the first St. Philip’s Church, built on the present site, Edmund Burke said that it “is spacious, and executed in a very handsome taste, exceeding everything of that kind which we have in America,” and another author (the biographer of Whitefield) called it “a grand church resembling one of the new Churches in London.” That building was constructed in 1723 and was the leading church in the State until its destruction in the great fire of 1835. The architectural proportions and beauty of the present St. Philip’s Church,--with its lofty steeple reaching to a height of nearly two hundred feet, from which shines at night a beacon light to mariners far away at sea,--“though perhaps peculiar to themselves, command the instant admiration of every beholder, professional or otherwise.” No visitor to Charleston fails to visit St. Michael’s Church, the finest piece of colonial ecclesiastical architecture in the South, and which was first opened for divine service in 1761. The story of its chime of bells attracts the stranger and makes the bells doubly dear to all born within the shadow of the lofty tower. They never jangled out of tune, except on the eventful night of August 31, 1886, when the steeple was swayed by the earthquake. In 1782, Major Traille, of the Royal Artillery, took possession of the bells as spoils of war and sent them back to England, but the next year they were repurchased by a Mr. Rhyner and sent back to Charleston, where they continued to voice the people’s joy or woe until the war between the States, when they were sent to Columbia for safe keeping. When General Sherman burned that city in 1865, two of the bells were stolen and the rest were so injured as to be useless. Once again the bells were shipped to England, where they were recast by the successors of the firm which had made them in 1764, from the same patterns, and again returned to Charleston and replaced in the belfry on March 21, 1867.