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."
If you inquire as to "monkey meat," your Charlestonian will tell you of the delectable mixture of cocoanut and molasses candy which is to the younger generation of the town as the incomparable Lady Baltimore cake is to the older.
*****
The churches of Charleston are her greatest charm. And of these, boldly asserting its prerogative by rising from the busiest corner of the town, the most famed is St. Michael's. St. Michael's is the lion of Charleston. Since 1764 she has stood there at Broad and Meeting streets and demanded the obeisance of the port—gladly rendered her. She has stood to her corner through sunshine and through storm—through the glad busy years when Charleston dreamed of power and of surpassing those upstart northern towns—New York and Boston—through the bitterness of two great wars and the dangers of a third and lesser one, through four cyclones and the most devastating earthquake that the Atlantic coast has ever known—through all these perils this solidly wrought Temple of the Lord has come safely. She is the real old lady of Charleston, and when she speaks the folk within the town stand at attention. The soft, sweet bells of St. Michael's are the tenderest memory that can come to a resident of the city when he is gone a long way from her streets and her lovely homes. And when the bells of St. Michael's have been stilled it has been a stilled Charleston.
For there have been times when the bells of St. Michael's have not spoken down from their high white belfry. In fact, they have crossed the Atlantic not less than five times. Cast in the middle of the eighteenth century in an English bell-foundry, they had hardly been hung within their belfry before the Revolution broke out—broke out at Charleston just as did the Civil War. Before the British left the city for the last time the commanding officer had claimed the eight bells as his "perquisite" and had shipped them back to England. An indignant American town demanded their return. Even the British commanding officer at New York, Sir Guy Carleton, did not have it within his heart to countenance such sacrilege. The bells had been already sold in England upon a speculation, but the purchaser was compelled to return them. The people of the Colonial town drew them from the wharf to St. Michael's in formal procession—the swinging of them anew was hardly a less ceremonial. The first notes they sang were like unto a religious rite. And for seventy years the soft voice of the old lady of Charleston spoke down to her children—at the quarters of the hours.
After those seventy years more war—ugly guns that are remembered with a shudder as "Swamp Angels," pouring shells into a proud, rebellious, hungry, unrelenting city, the stout white tower of St. Michael's a fair and shining mark for northern gunners. Charleston suddenly realized the danger to the voice of her pet old lady. There were few able-bodied men in the town—all of them were fighting within the Confederate lines—but they unshipped those precious bells and sent them up-state—to Columbia, the state capitol, far inland and safe from the possibility of sea marauders. They were hidden there but not so well but that Sherman's men in the march to the sea found them and by an act of vandalism which the South today believes far greater than that of an angered British army, completely destroyed them.
When peace came again Charleston—bruised and battered and bleeding Charleston, with the scars that time could never heal—gave first thought to her bells—a mere mass of molten and broken metal. There was a single chance and Charleston took it. That chance won. The English are a conservative nation—to put it lightly. The old bell-foundry still had the molds in which the chime was first cast—a hundred years before. Once again those old casts were wheeled into the foundry and from them came again the bells of St. Michael's, the sweetness of their tones unchanged. The town had regained its voice.