no tall, cheap flat houses draped with fire escapes and built to make herding places for the poor.  Many of the houses in this section are instead the former homes of fashionables who have moved to other quarters of the city—­handsome old homesteads with here and there a lovely, though battered, doorway sadly reminiscent of an earlier elegance.  So, also, red brick permeates the prosperous suburbs, such as Roland Park and Guilford, where, in a sweetly rolling country which lends itself to the arrangement of graceful winding roads and softly contoured plantings, stand quantities of pleasing homes, lately built, many of them colonial houses of red brick.  Indeed, it struck us that the only parts of Baltimore in which red brick was not the dominant note were the downtown business section and Mount Vernon Place.

Mount Vernon Place is the center of Baltimore.  Everything begins there, including Baedeker, who, in his little red book, gives it the asterisk of his approval, says that it “suggests Paris in its tasteful monuments and surrounding buildings,” and recommends the view from the top of the Washington Monument.

This monument, standing upon an eminence at the point where Charles and Monument Streets would cross each other were not their courses interrupted by the pleasing parked space of Mount Vernon Place, is a gray stone column, surmounted by a figure of Washington—­or, rather, by the point of a lightning rod under which the figure stands.  Other monuments are known as this monument or that, but when “the monument” is spoken of, the Washington Monument is inevitably meant.  This is quite natural, for it is not only the most simple and picturesque old monument in Baltimore, but also the largest, the oldest, and the most conspicuous:  its proud head, rising high in air, having for nearly a century dominated the city.  One catches glimpses of it down this street or that, or sees it from afar over the housetops; and sometimes, when the column is concealed from view by intervening buildings, and only the surmounting statue shows above them, one is struck by a sudden apparition of the Father of his Country strolling fantastically upon some distant roof.

Though it may be true that Mount Vernon Place, with its symmetrical parked center and its admirable bronzes (several of them by Barye), suggests Paris, and though it is certainly true that it is more like a Parisian square than a London square, nevertheless it is in reality an American square—­perhaps the finest of its kind in the United States.  If it were Parisian, it would have more trees and the surrounding buildings would be uniform in color and in cornice height.  It is perhaps as much like Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia as any other, and that resemblance is of the slightest, for Mount Vernon Place has a quality altogether its own.  It has no skyscrapers or semi-skyscrapers to throw it out of balance; and though the structures which surround it are of white stone, brown stone, and red brick, and of anything but homogeneous architecture, nevertheless a comparative uniformity of height, a universal solidity of construction, and a general grace about them, combine to give the Place an air of equilibrium and dignity and elegance.