ings
would be uniform in color and in cornice height. It is perhaps as much
like Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia as any other, and that
resemblance is of the slightest, for Mount Vernon Place has a quality
altogether its own. It has no skyscrapers or semi-skyscrapers to throw
it out of balance; and though the structures which surround it are of
white stone, brown stone, and red brick, and of anything but homogeneous
architecture, nevertheless a comparative uniformity of height, a
universal solidity of construction, and a general grace about them,
combine to give the Place an air of equilibrium and dignity and
elegance.

Including the Washington Monument, Baltimore has three lofty landmarks,
likely to be particularly noticed by the roving visitor. Of the
remaining two, one is the old brick shot-tower in the lower part of
town, which legend tells us was put up without the use of scaffolding
nearly a hundred years ago; while the other, a more modern, if less
modest structure, proudly surmounts a large commercial building and is
itself capped by the gigantic effigy of a bottle. This bottle is very
conspicuous because of its emplacement, because it revolves, and because
it is illuminated at night. You can never get away from it.

One evening I asked a man what the bottle meant up there.

"It's a memorial to Emerson," he told me.

"Are they so fond of Emerson down here?"

"I don't know as they are so all-fired fond of him," he answered.

"But they _must_ be fond of him to put up such a big memorial. Why, even
in Boston, where he was born, they have no such memorial as that."

"He put it up himself," said the man.

That struck me as strange. It seemed somehow out of character with the
great philosopher. Also, I could not see why, if he did wish to raise a
memorial to himself, he had elected to fashion it in the form of a
bottle and put it on top of an office building.

"I suppose there is some sort of symbolism about it?" I suggested.

"Now you got it," approved the man.

I gazed at the tower for a while in thought. Then I said:

"Do you suppose that Emerson meant something like this: that human life
or, indeed, the soul, may be likened to the contents of a bottle; that
day by day we use up some portion of the contents--call it, if you like,
the nectar of existence--until the fluid of life runs low, and at last
is gone entirely, leaving only the husk, as it were--or, to make the
metaphor more perfect, the shel