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: Its heart is in Mount Vernon square, Its head is in the green wood: Its feet are stretched along the ways Where swarms the foreign brood; A modicum of Bon Marche, That sublimated store-- And Oh, the treasure that we have In Charles street, Baltimore!