Including the Washington Monument, Baltimore has three lofty landmarks, likely to be particularly noticed by the roving visitor.  Of the remaining two, one is the old brick shot-tower in the lower part of town, which legend tells us was put up without the use of scaffolding nearly a hundred years ago; while the other, a more modern, if less modest structure, proudly surmounts a large commercial building and is itself capped by the gigantic effigy of a bottle.  This bottle is very conspicuous because of its emplacement, because it revolves, and because it is illuminated at night.  You can never get away from it.

One evening I asked a man what the bottle meant up there.

“It’s a memorial to Emerson,” he told me.

“Are they so fond of Emerson down here?”

“I don’t know as they are so all-fired fond of him,” he answered.

“But they must be fond of him to put up such a big memorial.  Why, even in Boston, where he was born, they have no such memorial as that.”

“He put it up himself,” said the man.

That struck me as strange.  It seemed somehow out of character with the great philosopher.  Also, I could not see why, if he did wish to raise a memorial to himself, he had elected to fashion it in the form of a bottle and put it on top of an office building.

“I suppose there is some sort of symbolism about it?” I suggested.

“Now you got it,” approved the man.

I gazed at the tower for a while in thought.  Then I said: 

“Do you suppose that Emerson meant something like this:  that human life or, indeed, the soul, may be likened to the contents of a bottle; that day by day we use up some portion of the contents—­call it, if you like, the nectar of existence—­until the fluid of life runs low, and at last is gone entirely, leaving only the husk, as it were—­or, to make the metaphor more perfect, the shell, or empty bottle:  the container of what Emerson himself called, if I recollect correctly, ’the soul that maketh all’—­do you suppose he meant to teach us some such thing as that?”

The man looked a little confused by this deep and beautiful thought.

“He might of meant that,” he said, somewhat dubiously.  “But they tell me Captain Emerson’s a practical man, and I reckon what he mainly meant was that he made his money out of this-here Bromo Seltzer, and he was darn glad of it, so he thought he’d put him up a big Bromo Seltzer bottle as a kind of cross between a monument and an ad.”

If the bottle tower represents certain modern concepts of what is suitable in architecture, it is nevertheless pleasant to record the fact that many honorable old buildings—­most of them residences—­survive in Baltimore, and that, because of their survival, the city looks older than New York and fully as old as either Philadelphia or Boston.  But in this, appearances are misleading, for New York and Boston