To call Charleston “unique,” and immediately thereafter to liken it to other places may seem paradoxical.  These likenesses are, however, evanescent.  It is not that Charleston is actually like other places, but that here in a church building, there in an old tile roof, wrought iron gate, or narrow cobbled street, the visitor will find himself delicately reminded of Old World towns and cities.  Mr. Howells, for example, found on the East Battery a faint suggestion of Venetian palaces, and in the doorway and gates of the Smyth house, in Legare Street, I was struck, also, with a Venetian suggestion so strange and subtle that I could not quite account for it.  At night some of the old narrow streets, between Meeting Street and Bay, made me think of streets in the old part of Paris, on the left bank of the Seine; or again I would stop before an ancient brick house which was Flemish, or which—­in the case of houses diagonally opposite St. Philip’s Church—­exampled the rude architecture of an old French village, stucco walls colored and chipped, red tile roof and all.  The busy part of King Street, on a Saturday night when the fleet was in, made me think of Havana, and the bluejackets seemed to me, for the moment, to be American sailors in a foreign port; and once, on the same evening’s walk, when I chanced to look to the westward across Marion Square, I found myself transported to the central place of a Belgian city, with a slope-shouldered church across the way masquerading as a hotel de ville, and the sidewalk lights at either side figuring in my imagination as those of pleasant terrace cafes.  So it was always.  The very hotel in which we stayed—­the Charleston—­is like no other hotel in the United States, though it has about it something which caused me to think of the old Southern, in St. Louis.  Still, it is not like the Southern.  It is more like some old hotel in a provincial city of France—­large and white, with a pleasing unevenness of floor, and, best of all, a great inner court which, in provincial France, might be a remise, but is here a garden.  If I mistake not, carriages and coaches did in earlier times drive through the arched entrance, now the main doorway, and into this courtyard, where passengers alighted and baggage was taken down.  The Planter’s Hotel, now a ruin, opposite the Huguenot Church, antedates all others in the city, and used to be the fashionable gathering place for wealthy Carolinians and their families who came to Charleston annually for the racing season.

The fact that Charleston has a rather important art museum and that its library is one of the four oldest town libraries in the country, no less than the fact that the city was, in its day, a great racing center, contribute to an understanding of the spirit of the place.  The present Charleston Library is not the first public library started in the city.  Not by any means!  For it was founded as late as 1748, and the original public library of Charleston