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 t