But no!  That won’t do.  It appears I have gotten mixed.  However, you know what I meant to indicate.  I merely meant to show that a horse dealer wouldn’t talk about a horse as an antique dealer would talk about a chair.  Even if the horse was once actually ridden by the Father of his Country, the dealer won’t stress the point.  You can’t get him to admit that a horse has reached years of discretion, let alone that it is one hundred and forty-five years old, or so.  It is this difference between the horse dealer and the dealer in antiques which keeps us in the dark to-day as to exactly which horses Washington rode and which he didn’t ride; although we know every chair he ever sat in, and every bed he ever slept in, and every house he ever stopped in, and how he is said to have caught his death of cold.

Having thus wandered afield, let me now resume my nocturnal walk.

Proceeding down Howard Street to Franklin, I judged by the signs I saw about me—­the conglomerate assortment of theaters, hotels, rathskellers, bars, and brilliantly lighted drug stores—­that here was the center of the city’s nighttime life.

Not far from this corner is the Academy, a very spacious and somewhat ancient theater, and although the hour was late, into the Academy I went with a ticket for standing room.

Arriving during an intermission, I had a good view of the auditorium.  It is reminiscent, in its interior “decoration,” of the recently torn-down Wallack’s Theater in New York.  The balcony is supported, after the old fashion, by posts, and there are boxes the tops of which are draped with tasseled curtains.  It is the kind of theater which suggests traditions, dust, and the possibility of fire and panic.

After looking about me for a time, I drew from my pocket a pamphlet which I had picked up in the hotel, and began to gather information about the “Monumental City,” as Baltimore sometimes calls itself—­thereby misusing the word, since “monumental” means, in one sense, “enduring,” and in another “pertaining to or serving as a monument”:  neither of which ideas it is intended, in this instance, to convey.  What Baltimore intends to indicate is, not that it pertains to monuments, but that monuments pertain to it:  that it is a city in which many monuments have been erected—­as is indeed the pleasing fact.  My pamphlet informed me that the first monument to Columbus and the first to George Washington were here put up, and that among the city’s other monuments was one to Francis Scott Key.  I had quite forgotten that it was at Baltimore that Key wrote the words of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and, as others may have done the same, it may be well here to recall the details.