American Adventures: A Second Trip 'Abroad at home'. Julian Street
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.
The two characteristic clubs of the city itself, the Maryland Club and the Baltimore Club, are known the country over. The former occupies a position in Baltimore comparable with that of the Union Club in New York, the Chicago Club in Chicago, or the Pacific Union in San Francisco, and has to its credit at least one famous dish: Terrapin, Maryland Club Style.
The Baltimore Club is used by a younger group of men and has a particularly pleasant home in a large mansion, formerly the residence of the Abell family, long known in connection with that noteworthy old sheet, the Baltimore "Sun," which, it may be remarked in passing, is curiously referred to by many Baltimoreans, not as the "Sun," but as the "Sun-paper."
This odd item reminds me of another: In the Balti-telephone book I chanced to notice under the letter "F" the entry:
Fisher, Frank, of J.
Upon inquiry I learned that the significance of this was that, there being more than one gentleman of the name of Frank Fisher in the city, this Mr. Frank Fisher added "of J" to his name (meaning "son of John") for purposes of differentiation. I was informed further that this custom is not uncommon in Baltimore, in cases where a name is duplicated, and I was shown another example: that of Mr. John Fyfe Symington of S.
A typically southern institution of long standing, and highly characteristic of the social life of Baltimore, is the Bachelors' Cotillion, one of the oldest dancing clubs in the country. During the season this organization gives a series of some half-dozen balls which are the events of the fashionable year.
The organization and general character of the Bachelors' Cotillion is not unlike that of the celebrated St. Cecilia Society of Charleston. The cost of membership is so slight that almost any eligible young man can easily afford it. There is, however, a long waiting-list. The club is controlled by a board of governors, the members of which hold office for life, and who, instead of being elected by the organization are selected in camera by the board itself, when vacancies occur.
The balls given by this society are known as the Monday Germans, and at these balls, which are held in the Lyric Theater, the city's débutantes are presented to society. As in all southern cities, much is made of débutantes in Baltimore. On the occasion of their first Monday German all their friends send them flowers, and they appear flower-laden at the ball, followed by their relatives who are freighted down with their darlings' superfluous bouquets. The modern steps are danced at these balls, but there are usually a few cotillion figures, albeit without "favors." And perhaps the best part of it all is that the first ball of the season, and the Christmas ball, end at one o'clock, and that all the others end at midnight. That seems to me a humane arrangement, although the opinion may only signify that I am growing old.
Another very characteristic phase of Baltimore life, and of southern life—at least in many cities—is that, instead of dealing with the baker, and the grocer, and the fish-market man around the corner, all Baltimore women go to the great market-sheds and do their own selecting under what amounts to one great roof.
The Lexington Market, to which my companion and I had the good fortune to be taken by a Baltimore lady, is comparable, in its picturesqueness with Les Halles of Paris, or the fascinating market in Seattle, where the Japanese pile up their fresh vegetables with such charming show of taste. The great sheds cover three long blocks, and in the countless stall-like shops which they contain may be found everything for the table, including flowers to trim it and after-dinner sweets. I doubt that any northern housewife knows such a market or such a profusion of comestibles. In one stall may be purchased meat, in the next vegetables, in the next fish, in the next bread and cake, in the next butter and buttermilk, in the next fruit, or game, or flowers, or—at Christmas time—tree trimmings. These stalls, with their contents, are duplicated over and over again; and if your fair guide be shopping for a dinner party, at which two men from out of town are to be initiated into the delights of the Baltimore cuisine, she may order up the costly and aristocratic Malacoclemmys, the diamond-back terrapin, sacred in Baltimore as is the Sacred Cod himself in Boston.
The admirable encyclopedia of Messrs. Funk & Wagnall's informs me that "the diamond-back salt-water terrapin … is caught in salt marshes along the coast from New England to Texas, the finest being those of the Massachusetts and the northern coasts." The italics are mine; and upon the italicized passage I expect the mayor and town council of Baltimore, or even the Government of the State of Maryland, to proceed against Messrs. Funk & Wagnalls, whose valuable volumes should forthwith be placed upon the State's index expurgatorius.
Of a marketman I obtained the following lore concerning the tortoise of the terrapin species:
In the Baltimore markets four kinds of terrapin are sold—not counting muskrat, which is sometimes disguised with sauce and sherry and served as a substitute. The cheapest and toughest terrapin is known as the "slider." Slightly superior to