Mrs. Leiding (Harriette Kershaw Leiding), of Charleston, has done a fine service to lovers of Old Charleston, and its ways, in collecting and publishing in pamphlet form a number of the cries of the negro street vendors. Of these I shall rob Mrs. Leiding's booklet of but one example—the cry of a little negro boy, a peddler of shrimp ("swimp"), who stood under a window in the early morning and sang:
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While on the subject of the Charleston negro I must not neglect two of his superstitions. One is his belief that a two-dollar bill is unlucky. The curse may be removed only by tearing off a corner of the bill. The other is that it is unlucky to hand any one a pin. A Charleston lady told me that when she was motoring and wished to pin her hat or her veil, she could never get her negro chauffeur to hand her pins. Instead he would stick them in the laprobe, or in the sleeve of his coat, whence she could pick them out herself. Another lady told me of the case of an old black slave who lived years ago on a plantation on the Santee River, owned by her family. This slave, who was a very powerful, taciturn and high-tempered man, had a curious habit of disappearing for about half an hour each day. He would go into the swamp, and for many years no one ever followed him, the other negroes being afraid to do so because of his temper and his strength. At last, however, they did spy upon him and discovered that in the swamp there stood a cypress tree on which were strange rude carvings, before which he prostrated himself. No one ever learned the exact significance of this, but it was assumed that the man practised some barbaric form of worship, brought from Africa.
The country back of Charleston is very lovely and is rich in interest, even though most of the houses on the old estates have been destroyed. Drayton Hall, however, stands, and the old Drayton estate, Magnolia, not far distant from the Hall (which was on another estate), has one of the most famous gardens in the world. Seven persons touching fingertips can barely encircle the trunks of some of the live-oaks at Magnolia; there are camellias more than twenty feet high, and a rose tree nearly as large, but the great glory of the garden is its huge azaleas—ninety-two varieties, it is said—which, when they blossom in the spring, are so wonderful that people make long journeys for no other purpose than to see them.
In "Harper's Magazine" for December, 1875, I find an account of the gardens which were, at that time, far from new. The azaleas were then twelve and thirteen feet tall; now, I am told, they reach to a height of more than twenty feet, with a corresponding spread.
"It is almost impossible," says the anonymous writer of the article, "to give a Northerner any idea of the affluence of color in this garden when its flowers are in bloom. Imagine a long walk with the moss-draped live-oaks overhead, a fairy lake and a bridge in the distance, and on each side the great fluffy masses of rose and pink and crimson, reaching far above your head, thousands upon tens of thousands of blossoms packed close together, with no green to mar the intensity of their color, rounding out in swelling curves of bloom down to the turf below, not pausing a few inches above it and showing bare stems or trunk, but spreading over the velvet, and trailing out like the rich robes of an empress. Stand on one side and look across the lawn; it is like a mad artist's dream of hues; it is like the Arabian nights; eyes that have never had color enough find here a full feast, and go away satisfied at last. And with all their gorgeousness, the hues are delicately mingled; the magic effect is produced not by unbroken banks of crude reds, but by blended shades, like the rich Oriental patterns of India shawls, which the European designers, with all their efforts, can never imitate."
Another remarkable garden, though not the equal of Magnolia, is at Middleton Place, not many miles away, and still another is at the pleasant winter resort town of Summerville, something more than twenty miles above Charleston. The latter, called the Pinehurst Tea Garden, is said to be the only tea garden in the United States. It is asserted that the teas produced here are better than those of China and Japan, and are equal to those of India. The Government is coöperating with the owners of this garden with a view to introducing tea planting in the country in a large way.
The finest grade of tea raised here is known as "Shelter Tea," and is sold only at the gardens, the price being five dollars per pound. It is a tea of the Assam species grown under shelters of wire mesh and pine straw. This type of tea is known in Japan, where it originated, as "sugar tea," because, owing to the fact that it is grown in the shade, the sap of the bush, which is of starchy quality, is turned chemically into sugar, giving the leaf an exceedingly delicate flavor.