If you approach Philadelphia by dusty highway, it is quite as appropriate that you come to Baltimore by water highway. A multitude of them run out from her brisk and busy harbor and not all of them find their way to the sea. In fact one of the most fascinating of all of them leads to Philadelphia—an ancient canal dug when the railroad was being born and in all these years a busy and a useful water-carrier. If you are a tourist and time is not a spurring object, take the little steamer which runs through the old canal from the city of William Penn to the city of Lord Baltimore. It is one of the nicest one-day trips that we know in all the east—and apparently the one that is the least known. Few gazetteers or tourist-guides recommend or even notice it. And yet it remains one of the most attractive single-day journeys by water that we have ever taken.

If you will only scan your atlas you will find that nature has offered slight aid to such a single-day voyage. She builded no direct way herself but long ago man made up the omission. He dug the Chesapeake and Delaware canal in the very year that railroading was born within the United States. For remember that in 1829 the dreamers, who many times build the future, saw the entire nation a great network of waterways—natural and artificial. They builded the Chesapeake and Delaware canal bigger than any that had gone before. No mere mule-drawn barges were to monopolize it. It was designed for river and bay craft—a highway for vessels of considerable tonnage.

You arrive at this canal after sailing three hours down the Delaware river from Philadelphia—past the Navy Yard at League island, the piers and jetties at Marcus Hook that help to keep navigation open throughout the winter and many and many a town whose age does not detract from all its charm. The river widens into a great estuary of the sea. The narrow procession of inbound and outbound craft files through a thin channel that finally widens in a really magnificent fairway.

Suddenly your steamer turns sharply toward the starboard, toward another of the sleepy little towns that you have been watching all the way down from Philadelphia—the man who knows and who stands beside you on the deck will tell you that it is Delaware City—and right there under a little clump of trees is the beginning of the canal. You can see it plainly, with its entrance lock and guarding light, and if the day be Sunday or some holiday the townfolk will be down under the trees watching the steamer enter the lock. It is not much of a lock—scarcely eleven inches of raise at the flow of the tide—but it serves to protect the languid stretch of canal that reaches a long way inland. This gateway is a busy one at all times, for the Chesapeake and Delaware is one of the few old-time canals that has retained its prestige and its traffic. An immense freight tonnage passes through it in addition to the day-boats and the night-boats between Philadelphia and Baltimore. Moreover, the motor boats are already finding it of great service as an important link in the inside water-route that stretches north and south for a considerable distance along the Atlantic coast.

Engines go at quarter-speed through the thirteen miles of the canal and the man who prefers to take his travel fast has no place upon the boat. Four miles an hour is its official speed limit and even then the "wash" of larger craft is frequently destructive to the banks. But what of that speed limit with a good magazine in your hands and a slowly changing vista of open country ever spread before your hungry eyes? You approach swing-bridges with distinction, they slowly unfold at the sharp order of the boat's whistle, holding back ancient nags of little Delaware, drawing mud-covered buggies; heavy Conestoga wagons filled with farm produce for the towns and cities to the north; sometimes a big automobile snorting and puffing as if in rage at a few minutes of enforced delay.

On the long stretches between the bridges the canal twists and turns as if finding its way, railroad fashion, between increasing slight elevations. Sometimes it is very wide and the tow-path side—for sailing-craft are often drawn by mules through it—is a slender embankment reaching across a broad expanse of water. You meet whole flotillas of freighters all the way and when edging your way past them you throw your Philadelphia morning paper into their wheel-houses you win real thanks. All the way the country changes its variety—and does not lose its fascination.

So sail to Baltimore. At Chesapeake City you are done with the canal, just when it may have begun to tire you ever and ever so slightly. Your vessel drops through a deep lock into the Back creek, an estuary of the Elk river. The Elk river in turn is an estuary of Chesapeake bay and you are upon one of the remote tendons of that really marvelous system of waterways that has its focal point in Hampton Roads and reaches for thousands of miles into Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina.

You sweep through the Elk river and then through the upper waters of the Chesapeake bay, just born from the yellow flood of the Susquehanna, as the day dies. As the sun is nearly down, your ship turns sharply, leaves the Bay and begins the ascent of the Patapsco river. Signs of a nearby city, a great city if you please, multiply. There are shipbuilding plants upon distant shores, the glares of foundry cupolas, multiplying commerce—Baltimore is close at hand.

And so you sail into Baltimore—into that lagoon-like harbor at the very heart of the town. The steamboats that go sailing further down the Chesapeake that poke their inquisitive noses into the reaches of the Pocomoke, the Pianatank, the Nanticoke, the Rappahannock, the Cocohannock, the Big Wicomico and the Little Wicomico—all of these water highways of a land of milk and honey and only rivaling one another in their quiet lordly beauty—sail in and out of Baltimore. There are many of these steamers as you come into the inner harbor of the city, tightly tethered together with noses against the pier just as we used to see horses tied closely to one another at the hitching-rails, at fair-time in the home town years ago. And they speak the strength of the manorial city of Lord Baltimore. For the city that sits upon the hills above her landlocked little harbor draws her strength from a rich country for many miles roundabout. For many years she has set there, confident in her strength, leading in progress, firm in resource.

For well you may call Baltimore—quite as much as Philadelphia—a city of first things. There are almost too many of these to be recounted here. It is worthy of note, however, that in Baltimore came the first use in America of illuminating gas, which drove out the candle and the oil lamp as relics of a past age. Baltimore's historic playhouse, Peale's Museum, was the first in all the land to be set aglow by the new illuminant. And one may well imagine the glow of pride also that dwelt that memorable evening upon the faces of all the folk who were gathered in that ancient temple of the drama.

And yet there was an earlier "first thing" of even greater importance—the hour of inspiration a century ago when an enemy's guns were trained on that stout old guardian of the town's harbor, Fort McHenry—an engagement to be remembered almost solely by the fact that the "Star Spangled Banner" first lodged itself in the mind of man. But to our minds the greatest of the many, many "first things" of Baltimore was the coming of the railroad. For the first real railroad system in America—the Baltimore & Ohio—was planned by the citizens of the old town—ambitious dreamers each of them—as an offset to those rival cities to the north, Philadelphia and New York, who were creating canals to develop their commerce—at the expense of the commerce of Baltimore. So it was that a little group of merchants gathered in the house of George Brown, on the evening of the 12th of February, 1827, a date not to be regarded lightly in the annals of the land. For out of that meeting was to come a new America—a growing land that refused to be bound by high mountains or wide rivers. Not that the little gathering of Baltimore merchants pointed an instant or an easy path to quick prosperity. The path of the Baltimore & Ohio was hedged about for many years with trials and disappointments. It was more than a quarter of a century before it was a railroad worthy of the name, meeting even in part the ideals and dreams of the men who had planned it to bring their city in touch with the Ohio and the other navigable rivers of the unknown West. And at the beginning it was a fog-blinded path that confronted them. Over in England an unknown youth was experimenting with that uncertain toy, the steam locomotive, while a Russian gentleman of known intelligence gravely predicted that a car set with sails to go before the wind upon its rails was the most practical form of transportation. And it is worthy of mention that the earliest of the Baltimore and Ohio steam locomotives was beaten in a neck-and-neck race toward the West by a stout gray horse. The name of the old locomotive is still recorded in the annals of the railroad but that of the gray horse is lost forever.

To know and to love the Baltimore of today, one must know and love the Baltimore of yesterday. He must know her lore, her traditions, her first families—the things that have gone to make the modern city. He must see, as through magic glasses, the Baltimore of other days, the city that came into her own within a very few years after the close of the American Revolution. His imagination must depict that stout old merchant and banker, Alexander Brown; Evan Thomas, the first president of Baltimore's own railroad; B. H. Latrobe, the first great architect and engineer that a young nation should come to know and whose real memorial is in certain portions of the great Federal Capitol at Washington. He must see Winans, the car-builder, and Peter Cooper, tinkering with the locomotive. He may turn toward less commercial things and find Rembrandt Peale; and if his glasses be softened by the amber tints of charity he may see a drunkard staggering through the streets of old Baltimore to die finally in a gutter, while some men put their fingers to their lips and whisper that "Mr. Poe's Raven may be literature after all."

It is indeed the old Baltimore that you must first come to know and to love, if you are ever to understand the personality of the Baltimore of today. The new Baltimore is a splendid city. Its fine new homes, its many, many schools and colleges proclaim that here is a center of real culture; its great churches, its theaters, its modern hotels, its broad avenues are worthy of a city of six hundred thousand humans. Druid Hill Park at the back of the new Baltimore is worthy of a city of a million souls. From it you can ride or stroll downtown through Eutaw place, that broad parked avenue which is the full pride of the new Baltimore. Suddenly you turn to the left, pass through a few mean streets, the gray pile of the Fifth Regiment armory, known nationally because of the great conventions that have been held beneath its spreading walls, see the nearby tower of Mount Royal station—after that you are in the region of the uptown hotels and theaters—thrusting themselves into the long lines of tight, red-brick houses. These are builded after the fashion of the Philadelphia houses, even as to their white marble door-steps, and yet possess a charm and distinction of their own.

There are many of these old houses upon this really fine street, and you crane your neck at the first intersection to catch its name upon the sign-post. "Charles Street" it reads and with a little gladsome memory you recall a bit of verse that you saw a long time ago in the Baltimore Sun. It reads somewhat after this fashion:

You are standing in Mount Vernon square, the very heart of Charles street. It is a little open place, shaped like a Maltese cross rather than a real square or oblong, with a modern apartment house looming up upon it, whose faÇades of French Renaissance give a slightly Parisian touch to that corner of the square. To the rest of it, bordered with sober, old-time mansions there is nothing Parisian, unless you stand apart and gaze at the Monument, which sends its great shaft some two hundred feet up into the air. There are such columns in Paris.

It is the Monument that dominates Mount Vernon square, that adds variety to the vistas up and down through Charles street. For eighty years it has stood there, straight and true; for eighty years General Washington has looked down into the gardens of Charles street, upon the children who are playing there, the folk coming home at night. It is the most dominating thing in Baltimore, which has never acquired the sky-scraper habit, and because of it we have always known Baltimore as the Monumental City.

Now turn from the modern Baltimore—right down this street which runs madly off the sharp hill of Mount Vernon square. Charles street, with all of its shops and gentle gayety, is quickly left behind. At the foot of the hill runs St. Paul street and it is a busy and a somewhat sordid way. But at St. Paul street rises Calvert station and since you are to see so many great railroad stations before you are done with the cities of America, take a second look at this. Calvert station is not great. It is not magnificent. It is not imposing. It is old, very, very old—as far as we know the oldest of all the important stations that are still in use today. From its smoky trainshed the trains have been going up the Northern Central toward Harrisburg and the Susquehanna country—the farther lands beyond—since 1848. And that trainshed, with its stout-pegged wooden-trussed roof held aloft on two rows of solid stone pillars, seems good for another sixty-five years.

Old Baltimore holds tightly to its ideals of yesterday. Over in another of the older parts of the town you can still find Camden station, which in 1857 was not only proclaimed as the finest railroad terminal that was ever built but that ever could be built, still in use and a busy place indeed. The Eutaw House, spared by the great fire of a decade ago, but finally forced to close its doors in the face of the competition of better located and more elaborate hostelries, still stands. The ancient cathedral remains a great lion, the old-time red shaft of the Merchants' Tower still thrusts itself into the vista as you look east from the Monument square there in front of the Post Office. Across the harbor you can find Fort McHenry, as silent sentinel of that busy place. Baltimore does not easily forget.

And here, as you plunge down into the little congested district roundabout Jones Falls you are at last in the really old Baltimore. The streets are as rambling and as crooked as old Quebec. Some of their gutters still run with sewage although it is to be fairly said to the credit of the town that she is today fast doing away with these. And once in a time you can stand at the open door of an oyster establishment and watch the negroes shocking those bivalves—singing as they work. For just below Baltimore is a great habitat of the oyster as well as of the crab, to say nothing of some more aristocratic denizens—the diamond-back terrapin for instance. Boys with trays—many of them negroes—walk the wharves and streets of old Baltimore selling cold deviled crabs at five cents each. Those crabs are uniformly delicious, and the boys sell them as freely on the streets as the boys down in Staunton and some other Virginia towns sell cold chicken.

Now we are across Jones FallsB—that unimpressive stream that gullies through Baltimore—and plunging into Old Town. Other cities may boast their quartiers, Baltimore has Old Town. And she clings to the name and the traditions it signifies with real affection. Here is indeed the oldest part of Old Town and if we search quietly through its narrow, crowded streets we may still see some of the old inns, dating well back into the eighteenth century, their cluttered court-yards still telling in eloquent silence of the commotion that used to come when the coaches started forth up the new National Pike to Cumberland or distant Wheeling, north to York and Philadelphia. And everywhere are the little old houses of that earlier day. Even in the more distinctively residential sections of the town many of them still stand, and they are so very much like toy houses enlarged under some powerful glass that we think of Spotless Town and those wonderful rhymes that we used to see above our heads in the street cars. But they represent Baltimore's solution of her housing problem.

For she has no tenements, even few high-grade apartments. She has, like her Quaker neighbor to the north, mile upon mile of little red-brick houses, all these also with white door-steps—marble many times, and in other times wood, kept dazzling and immaculate with fresh paintings. In these little houses Baltimore lives. You may find here and there some one of them no more than ten or twelve feet in width and but two stories high, but it is a house and while you occupy it, your own. And the rent of it is ridiculously low—compared even with the lower-priced apartments and the tenements of New York. That low rent, combined with the profuse and inexpensive markets of the town, makes Baltimore a cheap place in which to live. The proximity of her parks and the democracy of her boulevards makes her a very comfortable place of residence—even for a poor man. And you may live within your little house and of a summer evening sit upon your "pleasure porch" as comfortably as any prince.

In Baltimore it is always a "pleasure porch," thus proclaiming her as a real gateway to the old South—the South of flavor and of romance. In Baltimore, you always say "Baltimore City," probably in distinction to Baltimore county, which surrounds it, and your real Baltimorean delights to speak of his morning journal as "that Sun paper." The town clings conservatively to its old tricks of speech, and if you pick up that newspaper you will perhaps find the advertisement of an auctioneer preparing to sell the effects of some family "declining housekeeping."

That same fine conservatism is reflected in her nomenclature—first as you see it upon the shop signs and the door-plates. She has not felt the flood of foreign invasion as some of our other cities have felt it. She is not cosmopolitan—and she is proud of that. And the names that one sees along her streets are for the most part the good names of English lineage. Even the names of the streets themselves are proof of that—Alpaca and April alleys, Apple, and Apricot courts, Crab court, Cuba street, China street—which takes one back to the days of the famous clipper ships which sailed from the wharves of Baltimore—Featherbed lane, Johnny-cake road, Maidenchoice lane, Pen Lucy avenue, Sarah Ann street—who shall say that conservatism does not linger in these cognomens? And what shall one say of conservatism and Baltimore's devotion to Charles street, sending that famous thoroughfare up through the county to the north as Charles Street avenue and then as Charles Street Avenue extension?

Do not mistake Baltimore conservatism for a lack of progress. You can hardly make greater mistake. For Baltimore today is constantly planning to better her harbor, to improve the beginning that she has already made in the establishment of municipal docks—her jealousy of a certain Virginia harbor far to the south is working much good to herself. She is constantly bettering her markets—today they are not only among the most wonderful but the most efficient in the whole land. And today she is planning a great common terminal for freight right within her heart—a sizable enterprise to be erected at a cost of some ten millions of dollars. For she is determined that her reputation for giving good living to her citizens and at a low cost shall be maintained. She realizes that much of that cost is the cost of food distribution, and while almost every other city in the land is floundering and experimenting she is going straight ahead—with definite progress in view. Such purpose and such plans make first-rate aids to conservatism.

"Baltimore can prove to any one who will give her half a chance, what a good, a dignified, a charming thing it is to be an American town," writes one man of her. He knows her well and he does not go by the mark. Baltimore is good, is dignified, is altogether charming. And she is an American town of the very first rank.