St. Philip's is the more beautiful for the open space before it, and the graceful outward bend of Church Street in deference to the projecting portico
When the Civil War broke out St. Philip's bells were melted and made into cannon, but those of St. Michael's were left in place until cannonballs from the blockading fleet struck the church, when they were taken down and sent, together with the silver plate, to Columbia, South Carolina, for safe-keeping. But Columbia was, as matters turned out, the worst place to which they could have been sent. The silver was looted by troops under Sherman, and the bells were destroyed when the city was burned. The fragments were, however, collected and sent to England, whence the bells originally came, and there they were recast. Their music—perhaps the most characteristic of all the city's characteristic sounds—has been called "the voice of Charleston." Of the silver only a few fragments have been returned. One piece was found in a pawn shop in New York, and another in a small town in Ohio. Mais que voulez-vous? C'est la guerre!
In mentioning Charleston churches one becomes involved in a large matter. In 1801, when St. Mary's, the first Roman Catholic church in the city, was erected, there were already eighteen churches in existence, among them the present Huguenot Church, at the corner of Church and Queen Streets, which, though a very old building, is nevertheless the second Huguenot Church to occupy the same site, the first, built in 1687, having been destroyed in the great conflagration of 1796, which very nearly destroyed St. Philip's, as well. A number of the old Huguenot families long ago became Episcopalians, and the descendants of many of the early French settlers of Charleston, buried in the Huguenot churchyard, are now parishioners of St. Michael's and St. Philip's. The Huguenot Church in Charleston is the only church of this denomination in America; its liturgy is translated from the French, and services are held in French on the third Sunday of November, January and March. A Unitarian Church was established in 1817, as an offshoot of the Scotch Presbyterian Church, the old White Meeting House of which (built 1685, used by the British as a granary, during the Revolution, and torn down 1806) gave Meeting Street its name. Early in the history of the Unitarian Church, the home of which was a former Presbyterian Church building, in Archdale Street, Dr. Samuel Gilman, a young minister from Gloucester, Massachusetts, became its pastor. This was the same Dr. Gilman who wrote "Fair Harvard."
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.