"Yessa—a big fire dat," said the caretaker. "They gib two slaves dere freedom for helpin' at dat fire."
But history only records the fact that the efforts to put out the fire in St. Philip's were both feeble and futile. It does tell, however, of a negro sailor who, when the old church was threatened by fire on an earlier occasion, climbed to the tower and tore the blazing shingles from it and was afterward presented with his freedom and a fishing-boat and outfit. Does that sound familiar? It was in our Third Reader—some lurid verses but, alas for the accuracy that should be imparted to the growing mind—it was St. Michael's to whom that widespread glory was given. St. Michael's of the heart of the town once again. No wonder that St. Philip's of the side-street grieves in silence.
In silence, you say. How about the bells of St. Philip's?
If you are from the North it were better that you did not ask that question. The bells of St. Philip's, in their day hardly less famous than those of the sister church, went into cannon for the defense of the South. When the last of the copper gutters had been torn from the barren houses, when the final iron kettle had gone to the gun-foundry, the supreme sacrifice was made. The bells rang merrily on a Sabbath morn and for a final time. The next day they were unshipping them and one of the silvery voices of Charleston was forever hushed.
But St. Philip's has her own distinctions. In the first place, her own graveyard is a roll-call of the Colonial elect. Within it stands the humble tomb of him who was the greatest of all the great men of South Carolina—John C. Calhoun—while nightly from her high-lifted spire there gleams the only light that ever a church-tower sent far out to sea for the guidance of the mariner. The ship-pilots along the North Atlantic very well know when they pass Charleston light-ship, the range between Fort Sumter and St. Philip's spire shows a clear fairway all the distance up to the wharves of Charleston.
*****
There are other great churches of Charleston—some of them very handsome and with a deal of local history clustering about them, but perhaps none of these can approach in interest the Huguenot edifice at the corner of Queen and Church streets. It is a little church, modestly disdaining such a worldly thing as a spire, in a crumbling churchyard whose tombstones have their inscriptions written in French. A few folk find their way to it on Sunday mornings and there they listen attentively to its scholarly blind preacher, for sixty years the leader of his little flock. But this little chapel is the sole flame of a famous old faith, which still burns, albeit ever so faintly, in the blackness and the shadow of the New World.
That is the real Charleston—the unexpected confronting you at almost every turn of its quiet streets: here across from the shrine of the Huguenots a ruinous building through which white and negro children play together democratically and at will, and which in its day was the Planters' Hotel and a hostelry to be reckoned with; down another byway a tiny remnant of the city's one-time wall in the form of a powder magazine; over in Meeting street the attenuated market with a Greek temple of a hall set upon one end and the place where they sold the slaves still pointed out to folk from the North; farther down on Meeting street the hall of the South Carolina Society, a really exquisite aged building wherein that distinguished old-time organization together with its still older brother, the St. Andrews, still dines on an appointed day each month and whose polished ballroom floor has felt the light dance-falls of the St. Cecilias.
"The St. Cecilia Society?" you interrupt; "why, I've heard of that."
Of course you have. For the St. Cecilia typifies Charleston—the social life of the place, which is all there is left to it since her monumental tragedy of half a century ago. In Charleston there is no middle ground.