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VEN to-day they tell some strange stories of Stanwicke Hall. There is no truth in most of them. Yet, if you will visit Stanwicke Hall to-day, following the moss-curtained roads some twenty miles from Charleston (which is the modern spelling of old Charles Town), you will half believe the tales that are told.

The place is not beautiful like most of the old plantation manors of lowland Carolina that have come down from Colonial times. It is grim and forbidding and lonely. Its brick walls are still solid, having survived hurricane, earthquake and war. But its panelled rooms are a wreck; its lawns and gardens have vanished; there are great gaps in its noble avenue of live-oaks; of the secret underground passage which once, according to tradition, extended from the mansion to the river and through which smugglers and pirates are reputed to have passed, only a trace remains.

You cannot make your way through that mysterious tunnel now, for its walls have caved in and the falling earth has closed it. But there is a straight, narrow path, hedged in by trees and shrubbery, leading from the house to the river; and strolling along