A Western visitor said he knew it would not be as hard for a stranger to pass St. Peter as to get by one of the heirloom butlers at a Charleston gate. Some of these houses are nearly two centuries old, and in many of them the family name has been unchanged in that time. To sit on those “galleries” of the Charleston aristocracy in the fragrant days of early spring is one of the social memories that cling for life. There are the wonderful voices of the people who are talking. The accent is without imitation. It stands aloof as a study in folklore from any other accent in the South. It is a perceptible mixture of French and English, impossible to imitate or classify. The air is salty with the breezes that drift past Sumter from the sea, and keen with roses, jasmine and magnolias. The Spanish moss, trailing to the ground from sturdy oaks, is silver in the moonlight, mysterious in the shadow. The pathways called residence streets are lines between lawns and flowers. There is something here of the atmosphere of New Orleans, something of the pungent odor and nerve-soothing softness, but the Charlestonian is reposeful and the Creole is nervous and _staccato_. You feel that here is a corner where things need not change, where evolution is not worship, where the strenuous life is not considered and may be thought a trifle vulgar. It is not the simplicity of the simple-minded, not the stolid repose of the uneducated. It is the calmness of those who have helped to make history, who have achieved much, and who, believing they have no superiors, are not made restless with social ambition. The stranger who can lead those on the “galleries” to talk of days that have gone, of characters who exist, of quaint traditions that are kept, is fortunate. He has lifted a veil that hides much that is delightful and unique. It is told of the Charlestonian by his neighbors, that he often criticises some improvement in another part of the South with the remark, “If that change is progress, I want to progress backward.” Charleston protects her age and her traditions against all newcomers. She is not poor, she has few vagrants, she is not without a solid bank account, she is the greatest phosphate shipping port in the world, but, as a New York editorial writer said of her, “no tragedy that has passed over her, or no change that has been made in America, has ever been able to interrupt her prosperity or discourage her fixed purpose to be comfortable.” She would no more change her architecture, or willingly introduce new blood into her best families, than she would uproot the gravestones of her first inhabitants, who rest in St. Michael’s, or remove the shells of the bombardment from her walls.