Nor is there want of other history.  The Savannah Theater, though gutted by fire and rebuilt, is the same theater that Joseph Jefferson owned and managed for a time, in the fifties; in the house on Lafayette Square, now occupied by Judge W.W.  Lambdin, Robert E. Lee once stayed, and Thackeray is said to have written there a part of “The Virginians.”

A sad thing was happening in Savannah when we were there.  The Habersham house, one of the loveliest old mansions of the city, was being torn down to make room for a municipal auditorium.

The first Habersham in America was a Royal Governor of Georgia.  He had three sons one of whom, Joseph, had, by the outbreak of the Revolution, become a good enough American to join a band of young patriots who took prisoner the British governor, Sir James Wright.  The governor’s house was situated where the Telfair Academy now is.  He was placed under parole, but nevertheless fled to Bonaventure, the Tabnall estate, not far from the city, where he was protected by friends until he could escape to the British fleet, which then lay off Tybee Island at the mouth of the Savannah River, some eighteen miles below the city.  This same Joseph Habersham, it is said, led a party which went out in 1775 in skiffs—­called bateaux along this part of the coast—­boarded the British ship Hinchenbroke, lying at anchor in the river, and captured her in a hand-to-hand conflict.  Mr. Neyle Colquitt of Savannah, a descendant of the Habershams, tells me that the powder taken from the Hinchenbroke was used at the Battle of Bunker Hill.  After the war, in which Joseph Habersham commanded a regiment of regulars, he was made Postmaster General of the United States.  The old house itself was built by Archibald Bulloch, a progenitor of that Miss “Mittie” Bulloch who later became Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., mother of the President.  It was designed by an English architect named Jay, who did a number of the fine old houses of Savannah, which are almost without exception of the Georgian period.  Archibald Bulloch bought the lot on which he built the house from Matthew McAllister, great-grandfather of Ward McAllister.  When sold by Bulloch it passed through several hands and finally came into the possession of Robert Habersham, a son of Joseph.

The old house was spacious and its interiors had a fine formality about them.  The staircase, fireplace and chandeliers were handsome, and there was at the rear a charming oval room, the heavy mahogany doors of which were curved to conform to the shape of the walls.  To tear down such a house was sacrilege—­also it was a sacrilege hard to commit, for some of the basement walls were fifteen feet thick, and of solid brick straight through.

Sherman’s headquarters were on the Square, just south of the De Soto Hotel, in the battlemented brick mansion which is the residence of General Peter W. Meldrim, ex-president of the American Bar Association, and former Mayor of Savannah.