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