accompanied the official messengers, the signers of the note to
Anderson, James Chestnut and Stephen Lee. Years afterwards Pryor
told the story of the council in a way to establish its dramatic
significance. But would there be anything strange if a veteran
survivor, looking back to his youth, as all of us do through more
or less of mirage yielded to the unconscious artist that is in us
all and dramatized this event unaware?

Dawn was breaking gray, with a faint rain in the air, when the
first boom of the cannon awakened the city. Other detonations
followed in quick succession. Shells rose into the night from
both sides of the harbor and from floating batteries. How lightly
Charleston slept that night may be inferred from the accounts in
the newspapers. "At the report of the first gun," says the
Courier, "the city was nearly emptied of its inhabitants who
crowded the Battery and the wharves to witness the conflict."

The East Battery and the lower harbor of the lovely city of
Charleston have been preserved almost without alteration. What
they are today they were in the breaking dawn on April 12, 1861.
Business has gone up the rivers between which Charleston lies and
has left the point of the city's peninsula, where East Battery
looks outward to the Atlantic, in its perfect charm. There large
houses, pillared, with high piazzas, stand apart one from another
among gardens. With few exceptions they were built before the
middle of the century and all, with one exception, show the
classical taste of those days. The mariner, entering the spacious
inner sea that is Charleston Harbor, sights this row of stately
mansions even before he crosses the bar seven miles distant.
Holding straight onward up into the land he heads first for the