THE mighty colony of rich tourists who go South with the birds have begun to love two quaint, historic Southern cities. One hears gossip and anecdote of them in the Fifth Avenue clubs and the Philadelphia and Chicago drawing rooms. Many a man has become instantly persona grata in Northern centers because he registered from one of these towns.

Each city has recognized this advent of an army of Northerners in a different way—a way which indicates the heart and soul of the people. Charleston sits and smiles behind its jalousie blinds—a conservative relic of Huguenot days. Augusta leaps eagerly forward to meet them, commercially, if not always socially.

The difference between these two cities lying so close together, separated by the great yellow Savannah River, which leisurely picks its way among the rice savannas, is understood but not defined by the tourists. They are more desirous to enter into the social life, of these two places than they are of any other winter resort, for, while the South is honeycombed with Northern hotels, they are usually laid along the lines that will make capital for promoters. Beyond the climate and the visitors, there is nothing.

Palm Beach is an imitation of Monaco. It is not a city. It is without history. New Orleans is the quaintest city alive in America, but its horizon is broader, its basis more substantial, than any other Southern city, and it is not such a Mecca for the casual traveler. Neither is Richmond, with all its history and picturesque tradition.

Atlanta is the Chicago of the South, and is too busy with its future to remember it has not a cobwebbed past. Aiken, the best-known cottage resort of the South, is a suburb of Augusta. It is but a village in the pines.

This is the reason Charleston and Augusta stand with the Northerners for character study, history and individual charm. Yet thousands of travelers, eager as they are about it, know almost nothing of the core of these two cities. They dwell lovingly on the quaint houses of the one and the great street of the other, but the blinds are jealously down. The wooden shutters of the domestic life are kept closed. So they miss that which is most exquisite, most appealing, in any city—personality.

Charleston is, without doubt, the most exclusive city in America. It gives nothing out to the stranger beyond its physical beauty and tempered climate. One keen observer said of it: “It has only one equal—a German principality, where almost everyone is royal and noble and all intermarried. Other places and social codes exist, of course—New York, Chicago, Denver—but not for Charleston.”

A small child of that city was asked where Charleston was placed. Proudly she said, “It is between the Cooper and the Ashley Rivers, which join and form the ocean.”

When the Bostonian speaks grandly of the Mayflower, the Huguenot of Charleston smiles. He is remembering that Jean Ribaut landed a Huguenot emigration in Port Royal fifty-eight years before the Puritans landed in Massachusetts Bay. The Knickerbocker has no boast to make before the South Carolinian, because the Dutch settled New York over half a century later than Port Royal was begun.

Charleston was settled by aristocrats from France, and later from England—men who came from the court and wore the garments and spoke the language of the world’s highest circle. Like New Orleans, it sprang into life as a cultured community. It had not the struggle upward for social position. The great names it held then are its first names to-day. And the world recognizes the bearers of these names as those who have the hallmark of admission into the reserved social corners of America.

The St. Cecilia Society exists in all its former charm and exclusiveness. It is the oldest dancing club in America, as far as the Charlestonian has any record, although the Philadelphian claims this honor for the Quaker City’s famous Assemblies. It has not changed in one iota since the early days of the eighteenth century, and, as far as possible, the names of its managers have continued the same.

Josiah Quincy, who went to Charleston in 1773, says of the city, in his diary: “It far surpasses all I ever saw or ever expect to see in America.”

As early as January, 1734, Charleston had its drama, which was probably the first theatrical performance in America. Its citizens went to college in England; and Mr. Snowden, who knows his Charleston as Thackeray knew his London, says South Carolina headed all the colonies in the list of the London Inns of Court, and up to the time of the Revolution had forty-five law students there.

When the Philadelphian speaks serenely of the Liberty Bell, the Charlestonian smiles and remembers that in 1765 South Carolina took the first step for a Continental Union, and that in Charleston was formulated the first independent constitution in any of the colonies; also that she furnished three of the signers of the Declaration of Independence—Arthur Middleton, Thomas Heyward and Thomas Lynch, Jr. To the world of art it gave Charles Fraser, the great miniaturist; and Malbone also did his work there. The private houses held Gainsboroughs, Stuarts, Romneys and Wests in the eighteenth century.

These are a few of the reasons that give the Charlestonian that serene pride in self, country and relatives. This serenity broods over the city; and the shock of wars, earthquakes, tidal wave and stupendous fires has not shaken it.

Its laws of behavior and its rules of society are without change. Whatever happens in the rest of the world need not be followed there. There is a story told of the sexton of the famous old St. Michael’s, the notable church, and of Crum, the negro whom President Roosevelt made collector of the port. Crum brought several Northerners in a carriage to the door. It was at an hour when no one was allowed in the church. Crum insisted upon going in and taking his guests to the belfry to see the famous bells. The sexton declined to allow it.

The negro collector drew himself up and said to the sexton:

“You surely don’t know who I am. My name is Crum.”

“Well, you could be the whole loaf and you wouldn’t be allowed in St. Michael’s,” was the laconic answer.

It is easily inferred that the sexton was none too sorry to give a verbal blow to the negro collector who persuaded white men from the North to be his guests.

The Charleston negro who belongs to “the quality” shares and echoes his master’s pride of birth and social tradition. The man who for decades has delivered invitations for all the exclusive parties prides himself on knowing every person worth speaking to in the city. A certain Northern woman, who was kindly received in Charleston, gave a large ball. She asked this colored man to carry the invitations for her. In looking over the list, he made several suggestions concerning people who should be crossed out, and those who should be put on.

The Northern woman asked if he was quite sure he knew where all these people lived. His answer was delightful.

“Madam,” he said, “if there is any person in Charleston who lives where I don’t know, that person shouldn’t be invited to your ball.”

Another colored retainer of a famous family has a stiff-necked belief that nothing can happen to such aristocracy. A fire broke out in an adjoining house on a back street, burned through the dividing fence and destroyed the carriages in the stable. The master upbraided the old negro for allowing it to happen when he could easily have removed the traps. He said: “Massa, who’d ever t’ink dey fire would come in we yard!”

Another negro butler, who dominated the household of a certain judge, was serving at table one day when a second judge from up the State was present. Both men were equally well-born of an ancient and honorable ancestry, but the up-country man had not the graces of table etiquette.

When the fish course was served, he said to his host:

“Judge, I’d like to have some rice with this fish.”

“Did you hear the judge?” was asked the negro butler by the host.

The man gave a certain look at his master, then one of extreme annoyance at the guest. Leaning over, he whispered distinctly in the ear of the up-country judge:

“We don’t serve rice with fish in Charleston.”

The inner life of this Huguenot city is little known to the public, because Charleston won’t have it known. The same exclusiveness and privacy pervade her social and domestic system in the beginning of the twentieth as in the eighteenth century.

No detailed description of this feeling could so firmly fix it in the mind of the stranger as a remark made by a member of one of the oldest families in the city. When a certain history of the Revolution was published, it had a chapter on the part played in it by men of South Carolina. Included in this was an intimate description of the bravery of a Charleston general. An ancestor of this man wrote at once to the publisher:

“You will be so kind as to leave out in your next edition all allusions to my ancestor, General ——. What he did in the Revolution is a purely private and family matter, and we do not wish it boldly displayed for the public to read.”

In the next edition of the book the career of the Charlestonian was left out!

This pride, however, works in another way. The well-born Charlestonian expects the world to know who he is and whence he sprang.

This story is told—possibly as a joke, by Charlestonians—of an elderly man at the head of a family a member of which signed the Declaration of Independence. He presented a check to be cashed at a bank in another Southern city. The cashier told him he would have to be identified. To which he replied: “My God, has it come to this, that a M——n must be identified in America!”

Socially, Charleston exercises a spell over the visitor. A famous Northern lawyer, who went South last winter for the first time, could not make up his mind to step off the train into the Charleston station because of his rebellious feeling against that first shot at Sumter; so he went on to Florida. Coming back, he determined to conquer his prejudice and take a look at the Battery and St. Michael’s. He remained for days. His observant criticism for once failed him.

“What people! What culture! What society!” This was all he could say, but his exclamation points grew larger and longer after each phrase.

The first evidence of social quaintness in the town is the way the first families live. Here comes the strain of French blood. The venerable houses are placed among dense foliage, the side, never the front, of the house facing the street. In this side are the parlor and upper bedroom windows, which are never open to the public streets, but covered with wooden shutters. Instead of a front doorbell to ring, there is a small gate with a bell. This you tinkle, and a servant lets you in. There is a long piazza running the full side length of the house, which is often used as a sitting room. The piazza is usually protected by jalousie blinds. If the formal caller finds it deserted, he is shown in the reception room, with closed shutters, but in the warm days all informal entertaining is done on the piazza.

A Western visitor said he knew it would not be as hard for a stranger to pass St. Peter as to get by one of the heirloom butlers at a Charleston gate.

Some of these houses are nearly two centuries old, and in many of them the family name has been unchanged in that time. To sit on those “galleries” of the Charleston aristocracy in the fragrant days of early spring is one of the social memories that cling for life. There are the wonderful voices of the people who are talking. The accent is without imitation. It stands aloof as a study in folklore from any other accent in the South. It is a perceptible mixture of French and English, impossible to imitate or classify.

The air is salty with the breezes that drift past Sumter from the sea, and keen with roses, jasmine and magnolias. The Spanish moss, trailing to the ground from sturdy oaks, is silver in the moonlight, mysterious in the shadow.

The pathways called residence streets are lines between lawns and flowers. There is something here of the atmosphere of New Orleans, something of the pungent odor and nerve-soothing softness, but the Charlestonian is reposeful and the Creole is nervous and staccato.

You feel that here is a corner where things need not change, where evolution is not worship, where the strenuous life is not considered and may be thought a trifle vulgar.

It is not the simplicity of the simple-minded, not the stolid repose of the uneducated. It is the calmness of those who have helped to make history, who have achieved much, and who, believing they have no superiors, are not made restless with social ambition.

The stranger who can lead those on the “galleries” to talk of days that have gone, of characters who exist, of quaint traditions that are kept, is fortunate. He has lifted a veil that hides much that is delightful and unique.

It is told of the Charlestonian by his neighbors, that he often criticises some improvement in another part of the South with the remark, “If that change is progress, I want to progress backward.”

Charleston protects her age and her traditions against all newcomers. She is not poor, she has few vagrants, she is not without a solid bank account, she is the greatest phosphate shipping port in the world, but, as a New York editorial writer said of her, “no tragedy that has passed over her, or no change that has been made in America, has ever been able to interrupt her prosperity or discourage her fixed purpose to be comfortable.” She would no more change her architecture, or willingly introduce new blood into her best families, than she would uproot the gravestones of her first inhabitants, who rest in St. Michael’s, or remove the shells of the bombardment from her walls.

Her manners, her society, her behavior in drawing room, ballroom and street, are those of an older and more elegant world. Why should she change? The girls in all other parts of the South may go unchaperoned to balls, but she does not allow her girls to do it. Neither does the exclusive Philadelphian nor the Knickerbocker of New York.

Other clubs use their windows as lounging places for the curious, where idle men may sit and stare at the parade of women who pass on the street. Charleston considers this vulgar. The front windows of its club have drawn blinds. It is also regarded as beneath a gentleman to mention a woman’s name in the club.

Promoters can talk all they wish, but, charm they never so wisely, they can’t persuade the Charlestonian to welcome with delight a horde of unidentified tourists. Cottages are rented here and there for writers and artists and quiet people, but Charleston shakes her head when approached on the subject of huge hotels which will accommodate the man with millions from the swarming centers of America. She does not want her streets, her shops or her atmosphere invaded by aliens.

It is almost impossible to think of her graciously accepting new blood and new customs. The most notable person who came there would, if accepted, owe his reception to the fact that one of her own had said something of him. In this she has her counterpart in the creole of New Orleans.

General John B. Gordon described this feeling in the French city with a story of the Civil War. A Virginia soldier was boasting of General Robert E. Lee during the first year of the war.

“Lee? Lee? I think I have heard General Beauregard speak well of Lee,” answered the Creole zouave, as he rolled his cigarette.

Even the best lovers of innovation should eagerly desire Charleston to retain its serenity. New ways would mean tearing down old places, not at once, but in the end. And this would mean historical desecration.

St. Michael’s, its famous Episcopal church, should never be swamped by incongruous buildings, as New York’s famous old churches have been.

It is to be preserved not only because of its socially exclusive congregation, but because of the manifold troubles it has outlived.

Among its own people it is jestingly referred to as the Chapel of Ease of the St. Cecilia Society, but every South Carolinian ardently loves the old building. It was first opened for service in 1761, and is still the finest piece of church architecture in the South. In 1782 the English took possession of the bells, and sent them to Great Britain. The next year they were bought and sent back to Charleston. When General Sherman was an unwelcome guest in 1865, two bells were stolen and the rest made useless. These were sent to England, and a new set recast by the firm which had made them in 1764. The same patterns were exactly followed, and the bells replaced in 1867. During the great earthquake of 1886, the bells and belfry were fearfully shaken, but no harm came.

Augusta is not without her fine old past, too, but she is sharply different in her modern standpoint from her sister city across the Savannah. She gives Charleston the same adjective that New York kindly bestows on Philadelphia—the word “slow.”

Augusta is a modern. She eagerly discusses and adopts that which is new. She says of the Huguenot city that she “is joined to her idols, let her alone.” And while she may now and then run after new gods, she valiantly protects herself from any such reputation, and refers to Atlanta, the capital city, as “new, so new.”

If Charleston says, “Oglethorpe—adventurers,” too often, Augusta daringly answers back that the morals of the court of Louis were not quite swamped in the French ÉmigrÉs by Calvinism.

But it is a merry war, a family tiff, in which let the outsider beware of interfering.

Back of the rows of oaks are some splendid specimens of the finest early architecture for residence purposes; spacious homes, with rounded, vaulting white columns to support the arched faÇades which project over the windows of the second story.

In one of the great houses a ball was given last winter, where six spacious rooms on the lower floor were thrown open to the dancers, two square halls were given over to foliage, loungers and orchestra, and about three hundred guests were easily seated for an elaborate course supper.

These Augustans know how to entertain. They are a prosperous people, and they spend willingly and widely in New York on all the paraphernalia that goes to enhance the modern table. The women buy their clothes in New York whenever possible, and important dressmaking and tailor firms think it worth while to open up for part of the season at the two hotels that lure the Northern traveler. It is not the Northerner they cater to, but the Augustans.

Their social life is lavish and strenuous. The St. Valentine Ball, held once a year, is their oldest and most exclusive social function. While it has on its list the first families, still it is not such an institution as Charleston’s St. Cecilia, and there is constant talk of its being dissolved. It has an exclusive series during the season of dinner dances at its Country Club, which is one of the handsomest in the South.

Far from discouraging tourists’ hotels, Augusta is anxious for them. When the winter emigrants from the ice-swept North come well recommended, they are received into the fashionable life of the place. These people are always dazed at the magnitude and charm of the social life. Less the millionaire splendor, a season in Augusta is quite as time-absorbing as one in New York or Boston.

A New York bride who went there for two weeks on her honeymoon last year attended five balls and dances, twelve luncheons, ten afternoon teas and as many suppers, with a dozen invitations for morning card parties. The bridegroom naÏvely remarked, “I’ve never been on a honeymoon before, but this one doesn’t seem like the real thing.”

It is almost certain that no town with equal population in the East compares socially with the brilliancy of private life in this town on the Savannah.

The tea and sandwich afternoon “at homes” of the East are poverty-stricken affairs in the mind of an Augusta hostess.

“I wouldn’t treat a casual caller worse than that,” one of them remarked, after looking at the fare provided at a smart Northern afternoon affair, where the daughter of the house was being introduced to society.

At an Augusta “tea” one receives the daintiest dishes the markets offer, with wines and punch, prepared so as to follow out some artistic color scheme. Massive silver, candelabra, mahogany, lace and embroidered damasks, and profusion of Southern flowers, make these dining rooms a pungent memory with those who have had the good fortune to be asked behind the closed shutters.

Augusta is so modern in its desires and endeavors that it makes two tourists’ hotels, which crown its hills, a part of its social life. One is in Georgia, one in South Carolina, for the city is built on both sides of the Savannah River; and in these are given smart dinners and dances by the residents.

It is true they often refer to the guests of the hotels and to the Aiken cottagers as “the Yankee millionaires,” as though they belonged to another flag, and knew not the star-spangled banner. But if these people have anything to teach, Augusta wants to learn it.

Commercially, she is rapidly going ahead in an extensive cotton and manufacturing business, but her business streets do not give any idea of how progressive is her financial and personal element. There is still the dolce far niente to be expected in every Southern town except Atlanta and Richmond. The victorias still stop in front of drug stores and wait for the clerks to bring soda water out to the occupants on thirsty days; even occasionally one sees an ox team on the central street; but the personal element, the people, have a zestful, sprightly contact with modern life, and leap forward to meet its requirements and demands. The Augustan is modernizing himself and his home. Rapid transit in the business atmosphere may come later. It is bound to come, for the soul of the people has reached out toward it. It now remains merely a question of money; and Augusta is frankly striving after money, and making it.

The Easterner and Westerner do not see beneath the surface of the seeming commercial indolence. They are used to their own spick and span little towns, filled to the brim with bustle, noise, activity and the whoop-la of American get-ahead-of-your-neighbor atmosphere.

It may be that this will never be quite duplicated in a sub-tropical climate. But the business is there, even if the men do walk slowly.

The tourist, looking at commercial externals only, naturally marvels at the gowns of the women, the artistic and lavish homes, the unbridled entertaining and the constant touch its richer members keep with New York, nearly nine hundred miles away. Its people discuss the last play, the best opera and the newest dishes at Sherry’s as easily as they do home gossip. Naturally, this is not true of all the people, but it fairly represents the attitude of the leading set.

The New York trip has been made easy by the “Yankee millionaires,” who have made Augusta part of an elaborate railway and hotel system.

Of course there remains—and praise be that it is so—those of the old rÉgime. They are not altogether carried away by this elated modern spirit. They do not entertain tourists or the passing cottager. They are not quite sure but the new spirit may bring the Newport morals. They recoil from the constant phrase, “They do it in New York.”

They remind the imitative younger generation that a well-born Southerner has nothing to learn in manners and morals, and that progress is not always improvement.

They point to Charleston as the dignified ideal of all that is old and best.

They sigh, and say, “Things are not as they used to be.”

To which Punch would again reply, “They never were.”