* * * * *

In only one instance did the letters of introduction we sent out produce a response of the kind one would not be surprised at receiving in some rushing city of the North:  a telephone call.  A lady, not a native Charlestonian, but one who has lived actively about the world, rang us up, bade us welcome, and invited us to dinner.

But she was a very modern sort of lady, as witness not only her use of the telephone—­an instrument which seems in Charleston almost an anachronism; as, for that matter, the automobile does, too—­but her dinner hour, which was eight o’clock.  Very few Charleston families dine at night.  Dinner invitations are usually for three, or perhaps half-past three or four, in the afternoon, and there is a light supper in the evening.  I judge that this custom holds also in some other cities of the region, for I remember calling at the office of a large investment company in Wilmington, North Carolina, to find it wearing, at three in the afternoon, the deserted look of a New York office between twelve and one o’clock.  Every one had gone home to dinner.  Mr. W.D.  Howells, in his charming essay on Charleston, makes mention of this matter: 

“The place,” he says, “has its own laws and usages, and does not trouble itself to conform to those of 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