other aristocracies. In London the best
society dines at eight o'clock, and in Madrid at nine, but in Charleston
it dines at four.... It makes morning calls as well as afternoon calls,
but as the summer approaches the midday heat must invite rather to the
airy leisure of the verandas, and the cool quiescence of interiors
darkened against the fly in the morning and the mosquito at
night-fall."

The household fly is a year-round resident of Charleston, by grace of a
climate which permits--barely permits, at its coldest--the use of the
open surrey as a public vehicle in all seasons. Sometimes, during a
winter cold-snap, when a ride in a surrey is not a pleasant thing to
contemplate, when residents of old mansions have shut themselves into a
room or two heated by grate fires, then the fly seems to have
disappeared, but let the cold abate a little and out he comes again like
some rogue who, after brief and spurious penance, resumes the evil of
his ways.

The stranger going to a humble Charleston house will find on the gate a
coiled spring at the end of which hangs a bell. By touching the spring
and causing the bell to jingle he makes his presence known. The larger
houses have upon their gates bell-pulls or buttons which cause bells to
ring within. This is true of all houses which have front gardens. The
garden gate constitutes, by custom, a barrier comparable in a degree
with the front door of a Northern house; a usage arising, doubtless, out
of the fact that almost all important Charleston houses have not only
gardens, but first and second story galleries, and that in hot weather
these galleries become, as it were, exterior rooms, in which no small
part of the family life goes on. Many Charleston houses have their
gardens to the rear, and themselves abut upon the sidewalk. Calling at
such houses, you ring at what seems to be an ordinary front door, but
when the door is opened you find yourself entering not upon a hall, but
upon an exterior gallery running to the full depth of the house, down
which you walk to the actual house door. In still other houses--and this
is true of some of the most notable mansions of the city, including the
Pringle, Huger, and Rhett houses--admittance is by a street door of the
normal sort, opening upon a hall, and the galleries and gardens are at
the side or back, the position of the galleries in relation to the house
depending upon what point of the compass the house faces, the desirable
thing