American Adventures: A Second Trip 'Abroad at home'Street, Julian
General
American Adventures: A Second Trip 'Abroad at home'
Street, Julian
Southern States -- Description and travel; Southern States -- Social life and customs
Every one in Baltimore is proud of the Fallsway, but particularly so are
the city engineers who carried the work through. While in Baltimore I
had the pleasure of meeting one of these gentlemen, and I can assure you
that no young head of a family was ever more delighted with his new
cottage in a suburb, his wife, his children, his garden, and his collie
puppy, than was this engineer with his boulevard sewer. Like a lover, he
carried pictures of it in his pocket, and like a lover he would assure
you that it was "not like other sewers." Nor could he speak of it
without beginning to wish to take you out to see it--not merely for a
motor ride along the top of it, either. No, his hospitality did not
stop there. When _he_ invited you to a sewer he invited you _in_. And if
you went in with him, no one could make you come out until you wanted
to.
As he told my companion and me of the three great tubes, the walks
beside them, the conduits for gas and electricity, and all the other
wonders of the place, I began to wish that we might go with him, for,
though we have been to a good many places together, this was something
new: it was the first time we had ever been invited to drop into a sewer
and make ourselves as much at home as though we lived there.
My companion, however, seemed unsympathetic to the project.
"Sewers, you know," he said, when I taxed him with indifference, "have
come to have a very definite place in both the literary and the graphic
arts. How do you propose to treat it?"
"What do you mean?"
"When you write about it: Are you going to write about it as a realist,
a mystic, or a romanticist?"
I said I didn't know.
"Well, a man who is going to write of a sewer _ought_ to know," he told
me severely. "You're not up to sewers yet. They're too big for you. If
you take my advice you'll keep out of the sewers for the present and
stick to the gutters."
So I did.
CHAPTER V
TERRAPIN AND THINGS
Baltimore society has a Maryland and Virginia base, but is seasoned with
families of Acadian descent, and with others descended from the
Pennsylvania Dutch--those "Dutch" who, by the way, are not Dutch at all,
being of Saxon and Bavarian extraction. Many Virginians settled in
Baltimore after the war, and it may be in part owing to this fact, that
fox-hunting with horse and hound, as practised for three centuries past
in England, and for nearly two centuries by Virginia's country
gentlemen, is carried on extensively in the neighborhood of Baltimore,
by the Green Spring Valley Hunt Club, the Elkridge Fox-Hunting Club and
some others--which brings me to the subject of clubs in general.
The Baltimore Country Club, at Roland Park, just beyond the city limits,
has a large, well-set clubhouse, an active membership, and charming
rolling golf links, one peculiarity of the course being that a part of
the city's water-supply system has been utilized for hazards.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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