Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Annapolis We went to Annapolis on the electric line from Baltimore, and can recommend the trip to any one. It runs through charming country, all planted out in strawberry fields and wheat fields, in kitchen gardens, or else running wild to flourishing woods. Coming up from Richmond, we found the spring a trifle younger. Apple blossoms back on the trees, dogwood just whitening on the bough, and round the pretty houses the clear gold of forsythia. Annapolis is as clean and bright as a new whistle, in spite of its dignified age, witnessed by the innumerable stately mansions that speak a day when men built houses that matched a courtlier time and more gracious manners than we know to-day. When they built for a family, for sons to succeed them, and set their homes within gardens whose large leisure reflected their own spirit, unhurried, never idle, serene. Within its small extent Annapolis has more of these fine old homes than any other place in America. It has also been a sailor town so long it must be as spic and span as it is old and noble—there is the air of a quarterdeck to Annapolis. The little city is almost surrounded by water and the breath of the sea is sweet across it. Its greatest interest, next to its own existence, is the fact of the Naval Academy, of whose fine portals, with the dome of its Chapel, you constantly catch glimpses, now down some tree- embowered street, now across a little square, or beyond blue water and clustering fishing craft from an old wharf—and the old wharves are a mighty pleasant section of a most adorable town. The centre of all is the State House, a square Colonial building with a white cupola and noble portico, that stands on a slight rise, the avenues and streets leading to it from the radius of a circle, and a flourishin...