When the cry “Cornwallis is taken!” announced the final success of Washington and Lafayette, Baltimore’s exultation was unbounded. In the evening, we are told, there was a “Feau d’ Joy”: “the Town and Fell’s Point were elegantly illuminated; what few houses that were not, had their windows broke.” Upon the Point, Mr. Fell, “a gentleman of princely fortune,” nephew of the first Edward, gave a “genteel Ball and Entertainment,” where, Lieutenant Reeves tells us, “we danced and spent the night until three o’clock in the morning of the 23rd as agreeably as one could wish; as the ladies were very agreeable and the whole company seemed to be carryed away beyond themselves on this happy occasion.” Many years ago, one of the most distinguished of Baltimore’s sons, the Hon. John P. Kennedy, himself a scholar and an orator of the old _régime_, gave, in an informal lecture, some of his reminiscences of Baltimore town as it was at the end of the eighteenth century. Though often quoted, the quaint and charming spirit of the author makes his description yet as fresh and sparkling as his conversation ever used to be, and it is never too late to give in his own words some of his early memoirs of Baltimore town: “It was a treat to see this little Baltimore town just at the termination of the War of Independence, so conceited, bustling and debonair, growing up like a saucy, chubby boy, with his dumpling cheeks and short, grinning face, fat and mischievous, and bursting incontinently out of his clothes in spite of all the allowance of tucks and broad salvages. Market Street had shot, like a Nuremberg Snake out of its toy box, as far as Congress Hall, with its line of low-browed, hip-roofed wooden houses, in a disorderly array, standing forward and back, after the manner of a regiment of militia, with many an interval between the files. Some of these structures were painted blue and white, and some yellow; and here and there sprang up a more magnificent mansion of brick, with windows like a multiplication table and great wastes of wall between the stories, with occasional court-yards before them; and reverential locust-trees, under whose shade bevies of truant schoolboys, ragged little negroes and grotesque chimney-sweeps ‘skied coppers’ and disported themselves at marbles.