tead the former homes of fashionables who
have moved to other quarters of the city--handsome old homesteads with
here and there a lovely, though battered, doorway sadly reminiscent of
an earlier elegance. So, also, red brick permeates the prosperous
suburbs, such as Roland Park and Guilford, where, in a sweetly rolling
country which lends itself to the arrangement of graceful winding roads
and softly contoured plantings, stand quantities of pleasing homes,
lately built, many of them colonial houses of red brick. Indeed, it
struck us that the only parts of Baltimore in which red brick was not
the dominant note were the downtown business section and Mount Vernon
Place.

Mount Vernon Place is the center of Baltimore. Everything begins there,
including Baedeker, who, in his little red book, gives it the asterisk
of his approval, says that it "suggests Paris in its tasteful monuments
and surrounding buildings," and recommends the view from the top of the
Washington Monument.

This monument, standing upon an eminence at the point where Charles and
Monument Streets would cross each other were not their courses
interrupted by the pleasing parked space of Mount Vernon Place, is a
gray stone column, surmounted by a figure of Washington--or, rather, by
the point of a lightning rod under which the figure stands. Other
monuments are known as this monument or that, but when "the monument" is
spoken of, the Washington Monument is inevitably meant. This is quite
natural, for it is not only the most simple and picturesque old monument
in Baltimore, but also the largest, the oldest, and the most
conspicuous: its proud head, rising high in air, having for nearly a
century dominated the city. One catches glimpses of it down this street
or that, or sees it from afar over the housetops; and sometimes, when
the column is concealed from view by intervening buildings, and only the
surmounting statue shows above them, one is struck by a sudden
apparition of the Father of his Country strolling fantastically upon
some distant roof.

Though it may be true that Mount Vernon Place, with its symmetrical
parked center and its admirable bronzes (several of them by Barye),
suggests Paris, and though it is certainly true that it is more like a
Parisian square than a London square, nevertheless it is in reality an
American square--perhaps the finest of its kind in the United States. If
it were Parisian, it would have more trees and the surrounding build