Baltimore is rectangular in plan and picturesque, covering an undulating surface, the hills, which are many, inclining either to Jones's Falls or the harbor. Its popular title is the "Monumental City," given because it was the first American city that built fine monuments. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the State of Maryland erected on Charles Street a monument to General Washington, rising one hundred and ninety-five feet, a Doric shaft of white marble surmounted by his statue and upon a base fifty feet square. This splendid monument stands in a broadened avenue and at the summit of a hill, surrounded by tasteful lawns and flower gardens, with a fountain in front. It makes an attractive centre for Mount Vernon Place, which contains one of the finest collections of buildings in the city, and presents a scene essentially Parisian. Here are the Peabody Institute and the Garrett Mansion, both impressive buildings. Baltimore has a "Battle Monument," located on Calvert Street, in Monument Square, a marble shaft fifty-three feet high, marking the British invasion of 1814, and erected in memory of the men of Baltimore who fell in battle just outside the city, when the British forces marched from Elk River to Washington and burnt the Capitol, and the British fleet came up the Patapsco and shelled the town. The city also has other fine monuments, so that its popular name is well deserved. The City Hall is the chief building of Baltimore, a marble structure in Renaissance, costing $2,000,000, its elaborate dome rising two hundred and sixty feet, and giving a magnificent view over the city and harbor. There are two noted churches, the Mount Vernon Methodist Church, of greenstone, with buff and red facings and polished granite columns, being the finest, although the First Presbyterian Church, nearby, is regarded as the most elaborate specimen of Lancet-Gothic architecture in the country, its spire rising two hundred and sixty-eight feet. The Roman Catholic Cathedral is an attractive granite church, containing paintings presented by Louis XVI. and Charles X. of France. Cardinal Archbishop Gibbons, of Baltimore, is the Roman Catholic Primate of the United States. The greatest charities of the city are the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Johns Hopkins University, endowed by a Baltimore merchant who died in 1873, the joint endowments being $6,500,000. Hopkins was shrewd and penurious, and John W. Garrett persuaded him to make these princely endowments, much of his fortune being invested in the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, of which Garrett was President in its days of greatest prosperity. This railroad is the chief Baltimore institution, giving it a direct route to the Mississippi Valley, and was the first started of the great American trunk railways, its origin dating from 1826, when the movement began for its charter, which was granted by the Maryland Legislature the next year. This charter conferred most