Even without the aid of the Northern general, the city has been able to furnish disastrous conflagrations of her own, over a period of two centuries and more, and I find in the quaint reminiscences of Charles Fraser, already alluded to, a lamentation that, because of fires, many of the old landmarks have disappeared, and the city is “losing its look of picturesque antiquity.”  To make matters worse, there came, in 1886, an earthquake, rendering seven eighths of the houses uninhabitable until repairs aggregating some millions of dollars had been made.  Up to the time of the earthquake the old mansion from which Lord William Campbell fled at the beginning of the Revolution, was adorned by a battlemented roof.  It is recorded that when the shock came, an Englishman was in the house, and that in his eagerness to get outdoors he pushed others aside.  As he reached the front steps, however, the battlements came crashing down.  He was the one person from that house who perished, and his only monument is the patch of comparatively new stone where the broken steps have been repaired.

* * * * *

My companion and I achieved entrance to one of the famous old Charleston houses which we had been particularly anxious to see, through the kindness of a lady to whom we had a letter of introduction, who happened to be a relative of the owner of the house.

It seems necessary to explain, at this juncture, that in Charleston, many proper names of foreign origin have been corrupted in pronunciation.  A few examples will suffice:  The Dutch name Vanderhorst, conspicuous in the early annals of the city, has come to be pronounced “Van-Dross”; Legare, the name of another distinguished old family, commemorated in the name of Legare Street, is pronounced “Legree”; De Saussure has become “Dess-a-sore,” with the accent on the first syllable, and Prioleau is called “Pray-low.”

I was unaware of these matters when my companion and I visited the ancient house I speak of.  Though I had heard the name of the proprietor of the mansion spoken many times, and recognized it as a distinguished Charleston name, I had never seen it written; however, without having given the matter much thought, I had, unfortunately, reached my own conclusions as to how it was spelled.  Still more unfortunately, while I was delighting in the drawing-room of that wonderful old house, with the portraits of ladies in powdered hair and men in cocked hats and periwigs looking down upon me from the walls, I was impelled to reassure myself as to the spelling of the name.  Let us assume that the name sounded like “Bowfee.”  That was not it but it will suffice for illustration.

“I suppose,” I said to our charming cicerone, “that the family name is spelled ’B-o-w-f-e-e’?”