Builded of brick in most instances, the larger houses and the two most famous churches, as well, were long ago given plaster coatings that they might conform to the yellow-white dominating color of the town. Invariably very high and almost invariably very narrow and bald of cornice, these old houses are roofed with heavy corrugated tiles, once red but now softened by Time into a dozen different tints. If there is another town in the land where roof-tile has been used to such picturesque advantage we have failed to see it. It gives to Charleston an incredibly foreign aspect. If it were not for the Georgian churches and the older public buildings one might see in the plaster walls and the red-tiled roofs a distinct trace of the French or the Italian. Charleston herself is not unlike many towns that sleep in the south of France or the north of Italy. It only takes the hordes of negroes upon her streets to dispel the illusion that one is again treading some corner of the Old World. Perhaps the best way that the casual visitor to Charleston can appreciate these negroes is in their street calls--if he has not been up too late upon the preceding night. For long before seven o'clock the brigades of itinerant merchants are on their ways through the narrow streets of the old town. From the soft, deep marshlands behind it and the crevices and the turnings of the sea and all its inlets come the finest and the rarest of delicacies, and these food-stuffs find their way quite naturally to the street vendors. Porgies and garden truck, lobsters and shrimp and crab, home-made candies--the list runs to great length. You turn restlessly in your bed at dawn. Something has stolen that last precious "forty winks" away from you. If you could find that something.... Hark. There it is: Through the crispness of morning air it comes musically to your ears: "Swimpy waw, waw.... Swimpy waw, waw." And from another direction comes a slowly modulated: "Waw cwab. WAW Cwab. Waw Cwa-a-a-b." A sharp staccato breaks in upon both of these. "She cwaib, she cwaib, she cwaib," it calls, and you know that there is a preference in crabs. Up one street and down another, male vendors, female vendors old and young, but generally old. If any one wishes to sleep in Charleston--well, he simply cannot sleep late in Charleston. To dream of rest while: "Sweet Pete ate her! Sweet Pete ate her!" comes rolling up to your window in tones as dulcet as ever rang within an opera house would be outrageous. It is a merry jangle to open the day, quite as remote from euphony and as thoroughly delightful as the early morning church-bells of Montreal or of Quebec. By breakfast time it is quite gone--unless you wish to include the coal-black mammy who chants: "Come chilluns, get yer monkey meat--monkey _meat_." And that old relic of ante-bellum days who rides a two-wheel cart in all the narrow lanes and permeates the very air with his melancholy: "Char--coal. Char--coal."