Though the house has been “done over” four times, and though the paneling was torn out of one room to make way for wall paper when wall paper came into style, everything has now been restored, and the place stands to-day to all intents and purposes exactly as it was.  That so few changes were ever made in it, that it weathered successfully, with its contents, the disastrous period of Eastlake furniture and the American mansard roof, is a great credit to the Carroll family, and it is delightful to see such a house in the possession of those who can love it as it deserves to be loved, and preserve it as it deserves to be preserved.

Mr. Charles Bancroft Carroll, who is a graduate of Annapolis and a grandson of the late Governor John Lee Carroll of Maryland, now farms some twenty-four hundred acres of the five or six thousand which surround the manor house.  He raises blooded cattle and horses, and, though he rides with the Elkridge Hunt, also keeps his own pack and is starting the Howard County Hounds, an organization that will hunt the country around the manor, which is full of foxes.

Of the innumerable family portraits contained in the house not a few are valuable and almost all are pleasing.  When I remarked upon the high average of good looks among his progenitors, Mr. Carroll smiled in agreement, saying:  “Yes, I’m proud of these pictures of my ancestors; most people’s ancestors seem to have looked like the dickens.”

Among these noteworthy family portraits I recollect one of “the Signer” as a boy, standing on the shore and watching a ship sail out to sea; one of the three beautiful Caton sisters, his granddaughters, who lived at Brooklandwood, in the Green Spring Valley, now the home of Mr. Isaac Emerson; one of Charles Carroll of Homewood, son of “the Signer”; and one of Governor John Lee Carroll, who was born at Homewood.

The Caton sisters and Charles Carroll of Homewood supply to the Carroll family archives that picturesqueness which the history of every old family should possess; the former contributing beauty, the latter dash and extravagance, those qualities so annoying in a living relative, but so delightfully suggestive in an ancestor long defunct.  If anything more be needed to round out the composition, it is furnished by the ghosts of Doughoregan Manor:  an old housekeeper with jingling keys, and an invisible coach, the wheels of which are heard upon the driveway before the death of any member of the family.

Of the Caton sisters there were four, but because one of them, Mrs. McTavish, stayed at home and made the life of her grandfather happy, we do not hear so much of her as of the other three, who were internationally famous for their pulchritude, and were known in England as “the Three American Graces.”  All three married British peers, one becoming Marchioness of Wellesley, another Duchess of Leeds, while the third became the wife of Lord Stafford, one of the noblemen embalmed in verse by Fitz-Greene Halleck: