—­LONGFELLOW.

Before I went to Baltimore I had but two definite impressions connected with the place:  the first was of a tunnel, filled with coal gas, through which trains pass beneath the city; the second was that when a southbound train left Baltimore the time had come to think of cleaning up, preparatory to reaching Washington.

Arriving at Baltimore after dark, one gathers an impression of an adequate though not impressive Union Station from which one emerges to a district of good asphalted streets, the main ones wide and well lighted.  The Baltimore street lamps are large and very brilliant single globes, mounted upon the tops of substantial metal columns.  I do not remember having seen lamps of the same pattern in any other city.  It is a good pattern, but there is one thing about it which is not good at all, and that is the way the street names are lettered upon the sides of the globes.  Though the lettering is not large, it is large enough to be read easily in the daytime against the globe’s white surface, but to try to read it at night is like trying to read some little legend printed upon a blinding noon-day sun.  I noticed this particularly because I spent my first evening in wandering alone about the streets of Baltimore, and wished to keep track of my route in order that I might the more readily find my way back to the hotel.

Can most travelers, I wonder, enjoy as I do a solitary walk, by night, through the mysterious streets of a strange city?  Do they feel the same detached yet keen interest in unfamiliar highways, homes, and human beings, the same sense of being a wanderer from another world, a “messenger from Mars,” a Harun-al-Rashid, or, if not one of these, an imaginative adventurer like Tartarin?  Do they thrill at the sight of an ill-lighted street leading into a no-man’s-land of menacing dark shadows; at the promise of a glowing window puncturing the blackness here or there; at the invitation of some open doorway behind which unilluminated blackness hangs, threatening and tempting?  Do they rejoice in streets the names of which they have not heard before?  Do they—­as I do—­delight in irregularity:  in the curious forms of roofs and spires against the sky; in streets which run up hill or down; or which, instead of being straight, have jogs in them, or curves, or interesting intersections, at which other streets dart off from them obliquely, as though in a great hurry to get somewhere?  Do they love to emerge from a street which is narrow, dim, and deserted, upon one which is wide, bright, and crowded; and do they also like to leave a brilliant street and dive into the darkness of some somber byway?  Does a long row of lights lure them, block by block, toward distances unknown?  Are they tempted by the unfamiliar signs on passing street cars?  Do they yearn to board those cars and be transported by them into the mystic caverns of the night?  And when they see strangers who are evidently going somewhere with some special purpose, do they wish to follow; to find out where these beings are going, and why?  Do they wish to trail them, let the trail lead to a prize fight, to a church sociable, to a fire, to a fashionable ball, or to the ends of the world?