Tripping with the Tucker Twins. Speed Nell

only a short while ago. Our dresses did not spot.

      "Let's not go in any place this morning but just walk around and see from the outside. It would be low of us to do the graveyards and things without Zebedee. He loves those things and will want to see them," said Dee.

      It was a strange taste for one so cheerful, but it was the truth that Mr. Tucker was especially fond of poking around musty old churches and reading epitaphs on tombstones.

      We walked to St. Michael's, looking longingly through the iron gates at the quaint old tombstones, but refrained from going in for Zebedee's sake. We passed many beautiful old houses, some of them in perfect repair, brave in fresh paint, with trimmed hedges and gravel walks in their lovely old gardens that we could see by peering through the wrought-iron gates. Some of the houses, though, looked as though they had not been painted since the Revolution, and their gardens were grown up with weeds, with ragged, untrimmed hedges and neglected paths.

      Almost every house, big or little, boasts a southern gallery or porch. The houses are built right on the street, but the large door opens from the street to the porch and not to the house. The gardens are to the side and back, and, as a rule, are surrounded by great brick walls with either iron spikes across the top or ferocious broken bottles cemented to the bricks. The windows, opening on the street, are kept shuttered closely, and iron bars give you to understand that there is no breaking into Charleston society by night or day. The corners of the houses, where the porches are, also are protected from possible interlopers by great iron spikes, a foot long and sharp enough to pierce the hide of a rhinoceros. The porches are also shuttered, partly to protect the inmates from the rude gaze of the passer-by and partly to protect them from the ruder gaze of the southern sun.