gate, or narrow cobbled street, the visitor will find himself delicately
reminded of Old World towns and cities. Mr. Howells, for example, found
on the East Battery a faint suggestion of Venetian palaces, and in the
doorway and gates of the Smyth house, in Legaré Street, I was struck,
also, with a Venetian suggestion so strange and subtle that I could not
quite account for it. At night some of the old narrow streets, between
Meeting Street and Bay, made me think of streets in the old part of
Paris, on the left bank of the Seine; or again I would stop before an
ancient brick house which was Flemish, or which--in the case of houses
diagonally opposite St. Philip's Church--exampled the rude architecture
of an old French village, stucco walls colored and chipped, red tile
roof and all. The busy part of King Street, on a Saturday night when the
fleet was in, made me think of Havana, and the bluejackets seemed to me,
for the moment, to be American sailors in a foreign port; and once, on
the same evening's walk, when I chanced to look to the westward across
Marion Square, I found myself transported to the central _place_ of a
Belgian city, with a slope-shouldered church across the way masquerading
as a _hôtel de ville_, and the sidewalk lights at either side figuring
in my imagination as those of pleasant terrace cafés. So it was always.
The very hotel in which we stayed--the Charleston--is like no other
hotel in the United States, though it has about it something which
caused me to think of the old Southern, in St. Louis. Still, it is not
like the Southern. It is more like some old hotel in a provincial city
of France--large and white, with a pleasing unevenness of floor, and,
best of all, a great inner court which, in provincial France, might be a
_remise_, but is here a garden. If I mistake not, carriages and coaches
did in earlier times drive through the arched entrance, now the main
doorway, and into this courtyard, where passengers alighted and baggage
was taken down. The Planter's Hotel, now a ruin, opposite the Huguenot
Church, antedates all others in the city, and used to be the fashionable