Travels in Philadelphia/On the Way to Baltimore
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 cleaned out his stock every time. They had all evidently just bought new and very narrow-toed cordovan shoes in New York; there was hardly one who did not have his footgear off to nurse his tortured members. The negro soldier has a genius for injudicious purchase. We saw some of them the other day in a "pawn-brokers' outlet" on Market street laying down their fives and tens for the most preposterous gold watches, terrible embossed and flashy engines of inaccuracy, with chains like brass hawsers, obviously about as reliable as a sundial at night.
It was a gray and green day, quite cool—for it was still early forenoon—and we looked out on vanishing woodlands and bosky valleys with a delight too eager to express. Why (we thought) should any sane being waste his energy bedeviling the Senate when all a lifetime spent in attempting to describe the beauty of earth—surely an innocent ambition—would be insufficient? Statesmen, we thought, are but children of a smaller growth; and with a superbly evacuated mind we gazed upon the meadows and dancing streams near Leslie, just over the Maryland border. There were glimpses of that most alluring vista known to man: a strip of woodland thin enough to let through a twinkle of light from the other side. What a mystery there is about the edge of a wood, as you push through and wonder just what you may be coming to. In that corner of Cecil county there are many Forest of Arden glimpses, where the brown and velvety cows grazing in thickets seem (as the train flies by) almost like venison. There are swelling meadows against the sky, white with daisies and Queen Anne's lace; the lichened gray fences, horses straining at the harrow and white farmhouses sitting back among the domes of trees.
Then comes the glorious Susquehanna—that noble river that caught the fancy of R. L. S., you remember. He once began a poem with the refrain, "Beside the Susquehanna and along the Delaware." Olive-green below the high railway bridge, the water tints off to silver in the pale summer haze toward Port Deposit. The B. and O. bridge strides over an island in midstream, and looking down on the tops of the (probably) maples, they are a bright yellow with some blossom-business of their own. A lonely fisherman was squatting in a gray and weathered skiff near the bridge, What a river to go exploring along!
It is quaint that men who love to live in damp and viewless hollows always select the jovial and healthy spots to bury themselves in. Just beyond the Susquehanna, on the south side of the track, we pass a little graveyard in quite the most charming spot thereabouts, high on a hill overlooking the wide sweep of the river. And then again the green rolling ridges of Harford county, with yellow dirt roads luring one afoot, and the little brooks scuttling down toward Chesapeake through coverts of fern and brambles. We remembered the lovely verse of the Canadian poet, Charles G. D. Roberts:
Comes the lure of green things growing,
Comes the call of waters flowing—
And the wayfarer desire
Moves and wakes and would be going.
What a naughtiness of pagan temptation sings to one across that bewitching country; what illicit thoughts of rolltop desks consumed in the bonfire, of the warm dust soft under the bootsoles, and the bending road that dips into the wood among an ambush of pink magnolias. If the train were to halt at one of those little stations—say Joppa, near the Gunpowder river—there might be one less newspaper man in the world. I can see him, dropping off the train, lighting his pipe in the windless shelter of a pile of weather-beaten ties, and setting forth up the Gunpowder valley to discover the romantic hamlets of Madonna and Trump, lost in that green paradise of Maryland June. Or the little town of Loreley, on the other side of the stream! Think of the fireflies and the honeysuckle on a June evening in the village of Madonna! Ah, well, of what avail to imagine these things? The train, unluckily, does not stop.
And Baltimore itself, with its unique and leisurely charm, its marvelously individual atmosphere of well-being and assured loveliness and old serenity, how little it realizes how enchanting it is! Baltimore ought to pay a special luxury tax for the dark-eyed and almost insolent beauty of its girls, who gaze at one with the serene candor of unquestioned divinity. But that is a topic that belongs to Baltimore chroniclers, and we may not trespass on their privileges.
At any rate, we got our fishing rod, which is what we went for.