Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/134

 fern and brambles. We remembered the lovely verse of the Canadian poet, Charles G. D. Roberts:

What a naughtiness of pagan temptation sings to one across that bewitching country; what illicit thoughts of rolltop desks consumed in the bonfire, of the warm dust soft under the bootsoles, and the bending road that dips into the wood among an ambush of pink magnolias. If the train were to halt at one of those little stations—say Joppa, near the Gunpowder river—there might be one less newspaper man in the world. I can see him, dropping off the train, lighting his pipe in the windless shelter of a pile of weather-beaten ties, and setting forth up the Gunpowder valley to discover the romantic hamlets of Madonna and Trump, lost in that green paradise of Maryland June. Or the little town of Loreley, on the other side of the stream! Think of the fireflies and the honeysuckle on a June evening in the village of Madonna! Ah, well, of what avail to imagine these things? The train, unluckily, does not stop.

And Baltimore itself, with its unique and leisurely charm, its marvelously individual atmosphere of well-being and assured loveliness and old serenity, how little it realizes how enchanting it is! Baltimore ought to pay a special luxury tax for the