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The experience of arrival in Annapolis, delightful in any weather and at any time of year, gives one a satisfaction almost ecstatic after a cold, windy automobile ride such as we had suffered.  To ache for the shelter of almost any town, or any sort of building, and, with such yearnings, to arrive in this dreamy city, whose mild air seems to be compounded from fresh winds off a glittering blue sea, arrested by the barricade of ancient hospitable-looking houses, warmed by the glow of their sun-baked red brick, and freighted with a ghostly fragrance, as from the phantoms of the rose gardens of a century or two ago—­to arrive, frigid and forlorn in such a haven, to drink a cup of tea in the old Paca house (now a hotel), is to experience heaven after purgatory.  For there is no town that I know whose very house fronts hold out to the stranger that warm, old-fashioned welcome that Annapolis seems to give.

The Paca house, which as a hotel has acquired the name Carvel Hall, is the house that Winston Churchill had in mind as the Manners house, of his novel “Richard Carvel.”  A good idea of the house, as it was, may be obtained by visiting the Brice house, next door, for the two are almost twins.  When Mr. Churchill was a cadet at Annapolis, before the modern part of the Carvel Hall hotel was built, there were the remains of terraced gardens back of the old mansion, stepping down to an old spring house, and a rivulet which flowed through the grounds was full of watercress.  The book describes a party at the house and in these gardens.  The Chase house on Maryland Avenue was the one Mr. Churchill thought of as the home of Lionel Carvel, and he described the view from upper windows of this house, over the Harwood house, across the way, to the Severn.

Annapolis, Baedeker tells me, was the first chartered city in the United States, having been granted its charter by Queen Anne considerably more than two centuries ago.  It is, as every little boy and girl should know, the capital of Maryland, and is built around a little hill upon the top of which stands the old State House in which Washington surrendered his commission and in which met the first Constitutional Convention.

In its prime Annapolis was nearly as large a city as it is to-day, but that is not saying a great deal, for at the present time it has not so many inhabitants as Amarillo, Texas, or Brazil, Indiana.

Nevertheless, the life of Annapolis in colonial days, and in the days which followed them, was very brilliant, and we learn from the diary of General Washington and from the writings of amazed Englishmen and Frenchmen who visited the city in its period of glory that there were dinners and balls night after night, that the theater was encouraged in Annapolis more than in any other city, that the race meets compared with English race meets both as to the quality of the horses and of the fashionable attendance, that there were sixteen clubs, that the women of the city were beautiful, charming, and superbly dressed, that slaves in sumptuous liveries were to be seen about the streets, that certain gentlemen paid calls in barges which were rowed by half a dozen or more blacks, in uniform, and that the perpetual hospitality of the great houses was gorgeous and extravagant.