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 Falls[B]--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. [B] During the past year Baltimore has made a very creditable progress toward building an important commercial street over Jones Falls; thus transforming it into a hidden, tunneled sewer. Residents of the city will not soon forget, however, that it was at Jones Falls that the engines of the New York Fire Department took their stand and halted the great fire of 1904. E. H.