ON THE WAY TO BALTIMORE
The other day we had occasion to take a B. and O. train down to Baltimore. We had to hurry to catch the vehicle at that quaint abandoned château at Twenty-fourth and Chestnut, and when we settled down in the smoker we realized that we had embarked with no reading matter but a newspaper we had already read. We thought, with considerable irritation, that we were going to be bored.
We were never less bored in our life than during that two-hour ride. In the first place, the line of march of the B. and O. gives one quite a different view of the country from the course of the P. R. R., with which we are better acquainted. From the Pennsy. for instance, Wilmington appears as a smoky, shackish and not too comely city. In the eye of the genteel B. and O. it is a quiet suburb, with passive shady lawns about a modest station where a little old lady with a basket of eggs and black finger-gloves got gingerly on board. There were a number of colored doughboys in the car, just landed in New York and on their way to southern homes. "Oh, boy!" cried one of these as we left Wilmington, "de nex' stop's Baltimuh, an' dat's wheah mah native home at." Every ten minutes a fawn-tinted minion from some rearward dining car came through with a tray of ice-cream cones, and these childlike and amiable darkies
