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 the "slider" is the "fat-back," measuring, usually, about nine or ten inches in length, and costing, at retail, fifty cents to a dollar, according to season and demand.
Somewhat better than the "fat-back," but of about the same size and cost, is the "golden-stripe" terrapin; but all these are the merest poor relations of the diamond-back.