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Charles Town had been planned by Culpeper a hundred years ago, at a time and in a place that admitted of generous spaces and regular lines such as were not to be found in the Old World. Meeting Street in the European eyes of the Governor's equerry was a pleasant avenue, fringed with elms, and deriving a sense of width from the garden spaces between the houses on either side. Some of these, and mainly the more recent ones, of mellowing red brick, clothed in vine and honeysuckle, jasmine and glossy cherokee, were half-concealed amid the luxuriance of their gardens: others, of wood, but very solidly built, mainly of the timber of the black cypress, stood sideways to the thoroughfare, presenting to it no more than a gabled end, whilst the long fronts with their wide deep piazzas faced inwards upon the gardens, which were enclosed behind high brick walls. The scent of late-flowering bulbs, which early Dutch settlers had procured from Holland, mingled with the heavier perfume of jasmine and honeysuckle and the pungent fragrance which the sun was drawing from the pines.