After those seventy years more war--ugly guns that are remembered with a shudder as "Swamp Angels," pouring shells into a proud, rebellious, hungry, unrelenting city, the stout white tower of St. Michael's a fair and shining mark for northern gunners. Charleston suddenly realized the danger to the voice of her pet old lady. There were few able-bodied men in the town--all of them were fighting within the Confederate lines--but they unshipped those precious bells and sent them up-state--to Columbia, the state capitol, far inland and safe from the possibility of sea marauders. They were hidden there but not so well but that Sherman's men in the march to the sea found them and by an act of vandalism which the South today believes far greater than that of an angered British army, completely destroyed them. When peace came again Charleston--bruised and battered and bleeding Charleston, with the scars that time could never heal--gave first thought to her bells--a mere mass of molten and broken metal. There was a single chance and Charleston took it. That chance won. The English are a conservative nation--to put it lightly. The old bell-foundry still had the molds in which the chime was first cast--a hundred years before. Once again those old casts were wheeled into the foundry and from them came again the bells of St. Michael's, the sweetness of their tones unchanged. The town had regained its voice. If we have dwelt at length upon the bells of St. Michael's it is because they speak so truly the real personality of the town. The church itself is not of less interest. And the churchyard that surrounds it upon two sides is as filled with charm and rare flavor as any churchyard we have ever seen. Under its old stones sleep forever the folk who lived in Charleston in the days of her glories--Pringles and Pinckneys; Moultries; those three famous "R's" of South Carolina--Rutledge and Ravenel and Rhett--the names within that silent place read like the roster of the colonial aristocracy. Above the silent markers, the moldering and crumbling tombs, rises a riot of God's growing things; in the soft southern air a perpetual tribute to the dead--narcissus, oleander, jessamine, the stately Pride of India bush. And on the morning that we first strolled into the shady, quiet place a red-bird--the famous Cardinal Crossbeak of the south--sang to us from his perch in a magnolia tree. Twenty-four hours before and we had crossed the Hudson river at New York in a driving and a blizzard-threatening snowstorm.