It was a hard spring in Charleston; for it hailed heavy iron hail-stones from Sir Henry Clinton’s batteries, from April 1 to May 12, 1780; when the city became so riddled that it gave up. The storm soon spread, bursting over the entire States of North and South Carolina, and beating down for a time, as with iron flails, the growing harvest of patriotism. A good part of the crop was, however, finally saved during the late summer, by Marion, Pickens, and Sumter, who, with their sturdy little bands of reapers, toiled all through the blinding storms with high spirits, and without pay. Sumter was well called “The Carolina Game-cock”; for he often drove his sharp spurs into Corwallis and Tarleton, and roused a very cheery feeling by his crows through those gray mornings of liberty. Gates, who had so successfully administered Saratoga water to Burgoyne and his men three years before, was despatched in haste to look after the obstinate and severe cases of Clinton, Rawdon, and Cornwallis in South Carolina; but, as it often happens, the remedies successfully applied to one patient often fail with another. At Camden—a name which should have been propitious to American arms—the army of Gates was seized by that frightful epidemic, a panic; and ran away, carrying off with them their general’s sole chance for the next Presidency. Nathaniel Greene, a Rhode Island Quaker,—the ungloved right hand of Washington, who had served in the army with brilliant and yet solid success since June, 1775,—succeeded the unsuccessful Gates in August, 1780; but the heats of summer melted out all serious campaign attempts on either side, through the South, during that season. St. Louis, then a village sixteen years old with nine hundred and sixty inhabitants, exalted above the dirty Mississippi on two terraces, or a double platform of earth, was assailed by some Englishmen and Indians from Michilimackinac,—as it has often been since, by people of all nations; but on this first invasion the invaders were as glad to get away as their successors have been to stay. Meanwhile General Greene was detailed to act as president of the court of inquiry upon Major André, that historical romance of our war, as Mary Queen of Scots is the sentiment of the tough annals of Scotland. This handsome, romantic, cultivated, and high-bred Englishman, then in his twenty-ninth year, who had unsuccessfully courted in Ireland the future mother of Maria Edgeworth, the novelist, and then won a better fortune from the golden hands of trade, had afterwards flung himself into the stern arms of war. Lowering himself to the mean business of carrying dangerous, sealed secrets in his boots, outside the mails, contrary to all laws, and caught in the act by three militiamen, who, after playing cards with each other, played a sharper and more patriotic game with him, he was most disagreeably elevated to the rank of a spy, and sent in consequence to find out the great secret on a very lonesome journey.