he 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 Charles Street, midway on its course between the Union Station and
Mount Vernon Place, are at night, even more than by day, full of the
suggestion of comfortable and settled domesticity. Their brick houses,
standing wall to wall and close to the sidewalk, speak of honorable age,
and, in some cases of a fine and ancient dignity. One fancies that in
many of these houses the best of old mahogany may be found, or, if not
that, then at least the fairly old and quite creditable furniture of the
period of the sleigh-back bed, the haircloth-covered rosewood sofa, and
the tall, narrow mirror between the two front windows of the drawing
room.

Through the glass panels of street doors and beneath half-drawn window
shades the early-evening wayfarer may perceive a feeble glow as of
illuminating gas turned low; but by ten o'clock these lights have begun
to disappear, indicating--or so, at all events, I chose to believe--that
certain old ladies wearing caps and black silk gowns with old lace
fichus held in place by ancient cameos, have proceeded slowly,
rustlingly, upstairs to bed, accompanied by their cats.

At Cathedral Street, a block or two from Charles, Biddle Street performs
a jog, dashing off at a tangent from its former course, while Chase
Street not only jogs and turns at the corresponding intersection, but
does so again, where, at the next corner, it meets at once with Park
Avenue and Berkeley Street. After this it runs but a short way and dies,
as though exhausted by its own contortions.

Here, in a region of malformed city blocks--some of them pentagonal,
some irregularly qu