It is said that President Washington once went to Terra Rubra to visit his old friend.  General John Ross Key, of Revolutionary fame.  It may be that the venerated hand of the “Father of His Country”—­the hand that had so resolutely put away all selfish ambitions and had reached out only for good things to bestow upon his people and his nation—­was laid in blessing upon the bright young head of little Francis Scott Key, helping to plant in the youthful heart the seed that afterward blossomed into the thought which he expressed many years later: 

    I have said that patriotism is the preserving virtue of Republics. 
    Let this virtue wither and selfish ambition assume its place as
    the motive for action, and the Republic is lost.

    Here, my countrymen, is the sole ground of danger.

Seven miles from Annapolis, where the Severn River flows into Round Bay, stands Belvoir, a spacious manor-house with sixteen-inch walls, in which are great windows reaching down to the polished oak floor.  In this home of Francis Key, his grandfather, the young Francis Scott Key spent a part of the time of his tutelage, preparing for entrance into St. John’s College, the stately buildings of which were erected by a certain early Key, who had come to our shore to help unlock the gates of liberty for the world.

The old college, with its historic campus, fits well into the atmosphere of Annapolis, standing proudly in her eighteenth-century dignity, watching the rest of the world scramble in a helter-skelter rush for modern trivialities.  Its old walls are in pleasing harmony with the colonial mansions poised on little hillocks, from which they look down on you with benevolent condescension and invite you to climb the long flights of steps that lead to their very hearts, grand but hospitable, which you do in a glow of high-pitched ambition, as if you were scaling an arduous but fascinating intellectual height.  Having reached the summit, you stop an instant on the landing, partly for breathing purposes, but more especially to exult a moment on the height of triumph.

The four-storied college at the end of Prince George Street—­regal Annapolis would not be content with a street of less than royal dignity—­looks down with pleased approval on its wide expanse of green campus, for that stretch of ground has a history that makes it worthy of the noble building which it supports.  It spread its greenery to the view of those window-eyes decades before the Revolution, and when that fiery torch flamed upon the country’s record the college green furnished a camping place for the freedom-loving Frenchmen who came over the sea to help set our stars permanently into the blue of our national sky.  In 1812 American troops pitched their tents on the famous campus, and under the waving green of its summer grasses and the white canopy of its winter snows men who died for their country’s honor lie in their long sleep.