American Adventures | Page 6

progress between the city's
tenements, with untidy bedding airing in some windows and fat old
slatterns leaning out from others to survey the sordidness and squalor
of the streets below. A swift plunge into darkness, some thundering
moments, and your train glides out upon the wide wastes of the New
Jersey meadows. The city is gone. You are even in another State. Far,
far behind, bathed in glimmering haze which gives them the appearance
of palaces in a mirage, you may see the tops of New York's towering
sky-scrapers, dwarfed yet beautified by distance. Outside the wide car
window the advertising sign-boards pass to the rear in steady parade,
shrieking in strong color of whiskies, tobaccos, pills, chewing gums,
cough drops, flours, hams, hotels, soaps, socks, and shows.
CHAPTER II
A BALTIMORE EVENING
I felt her presence by its spell of might, Stoop o'er me from above; The
calm, majestic presence of the night, As of the one I love.
--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?

For the traveler who does not know such sensations and such impulses
as these--who has not at times indulged in the joy of yielding to an
inclination of at least mildly fantastic character--I am profoundly sorry.
The blind themselves are not so blind as those who, seeing with the
physical eye, lack the eye of imagination.
Residence streets like Chase and Biddle, in the blocks near where they
cross