So wrote Owen Wister of the city that he came to know so well. You can read Charleston in _Lady Baltimore_ each time he speaks of "King's Port" and read correctly. For it was in Charleston he spun his romance of the last stronghold of old manners, old families, old traditions and old affections. In no other city of the land might he have laid such a story. For no other city of the land bears the memory of tragedy so plaintively, so uncomplainingly as the old town that occupies the flat peninsula between the Cooper and the Ashley rivers at the very gateway of South Carolina. Like a scarred man, Charleston will bear the visible traces of her great disaster until the end of her days. And each of them, like the scars of Richmond, makes her but the more potent in her charm. Up one street and down another--fascinating pathways, every blessed one of them. Meeting and King and Queen and Legare and Calhoun and Tradd--with their high, narrow-ended houses rising right from the sidewalks and stretching, with their generous spirit of hospitality, inward, beside gardens that blossom as only a southern garden can bloom--with jessamine and narcissus and oleander and japonica. Galleries give to these fragrant gardens. Only Charleston, unique among her sisters of the Southland, does not call them galleries. She calls them piazzas, with the accent strong upon the "pi." The gardens themselves are more than a little English, speaking clearly something of the old-time English spirit of the town, which has its most visible other expression in the stolid Georgian architecture of its older public buildings and churches. And some of the older folk, defying the Charleston convention of four o'clock dinner, will take tea in the softness of the late afternoon. Local tradition still relates how, in other days, a certain distinguished and elderly citizen, possessing neither garden nor gallery with his house, was wont to have a table and chair placed upon the sidewalk and there take his tea of a late afternoon. And the Charleston of that other day walked upon the far side of the street rather than disturb the gentleman!