On the April day half a century ago that the first gun blazed defiantly from Fort Sumter and opened a page of history that bade fair to alter the very course of things, Prosperity slipped out of Charleston. Gentility, Courage, Romance alone remained. Prosperity with her giant steamships and her long railroad trains never returned. The great docks along the front of the splendid harbor stand unused, the warehouses upon them molder. A brisk Texas town upon a sand-spit--Galveston--boasts that she is the second ocean-port of America, with the hundreds of thousands of Texas acres turned from grazing ranges into cotton-field, just behind her. New Orleans is the south gate of the Middle West that has come into existence, since Charleston faced her greatest of tragedies. And the docks along her waterfront grow rusty with disuse. She lives in her yesterdays of triumphs. Tell her that they have builded a tower in New York that is fifty-five stories in height, and she will reply that you can still see the house in Church street where President Washington was entertained in royal fashion by her citizens; hint to her of the great canal to the south, and she will ask you if you remember how the blockade runners slipped night after night through the tight chain that the Federal gunboats drew across the entrance of her harbor for four long years; bespeak into her ears the social glories of the great hotels and the opera of New York, and she will tell you of the gentle French and English blood that went into the making of her first families. Charleston has lost nothing. For what is Prosperity, she may ask you, but a dollar-mark? Romance and Courtesy are without price. Romance and Courtesy still walk in her streets, in the hot and lazy summer days, in the brilliancy of the southern moon beating down upon her graceful guarding spires, in the thunder of the storm and the soft gray blankets of the ocean mantling her houses and her gardens. And Romance and Courtesy do not forget. 9 ROCHESTER--AND HER NEIGHBORS The three great cities of western New York--Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo--are like jewels to the famous railroad along which they are strung, and effectively they serve to offset the great metropolitan district at the east end of the state. They have many things in common and yet they are not in the least alike. Their growth has been due to virtually a common cause; the development of transportation facilities across New York state; and yet their personality is as varied as that of three sisters; lovely but different.