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Very different from the spirit of appreciation and emulation shown by the trustees of Johns Hopkins University with regard to the old house, Homewood, in Baltimore, is that manifested in the architecture of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, where, in a city fairly flooded with examples of buildings, both beautiful and typically American, architectural hints were ignored, and there were erected great stone structures whose chief characteristics are size, solidity, and the look of being “government property.”  The main buildings of the Academy, with the exception of the chapel, suggest the sort of sublimated penitentiary that Mr. Thomas Mott Osborne might, one fancies, construct under a carte-blanche authorization, while the chapel, the huge dome of which is visible to all the country round, makes one think of a monstrous wedding cake fashioned in the form of a building and covered with white and yellow frosting in ornamental patterns.

This chapel, one imagines, may have been inspired by the Invalides in Paris, but of the Invalides it falls far short.  I know nothing of the history of the building, but it is easy to believe that the original intention may have been to place at the center of it, under the dome, a great well, over the parapet of which might have been seen the sarcophagus of John Paul Jones, in the crypt.  One prefers to think that the architect had some such plan; for the crypt, as at present arranged, is hardly more than a dark cellar, approached by what seems to be a flight of humble back stairs.  To descend into it, and find there the great marble coffin with its bronze dolphins, is not unlike going down into the cellar of a residence and there discovering the family silver reposing in the coal-bin.

In this connection it is interesting to recall the fact that our sometimes piratical and always brilliant Revolutionary naval hero died in Paris, and that until a few years ago his resting place was unknown.  The reader will remember that while General Horace Porter was American ambassador to France a search was instituted for the remains of John Paul Jones, the greater part of the work having been conducted by Colonel H. Baily Blanchard, then first secretary of the Embassy, assisted by the ambassador and Mr. Henry Vignaud, dean of secretaries of embassy.  The resting place of Jones was finally discovered in an abandoned cemetery in the city of Paris, over which houses had been built.  The body was contained in a leaden casket and was preserved in alcohol so that identification was easily accomplished by means of a contemporaneous likeness of Jones, and also by means of measurements taken from Houdin’s bust.  The remains were accorded military honors in Paris, and were brought to this country on a war vessel.

Why the crypt at Annapolis is as it is, I do not know, but in my own purely imaginary picture of what happened, I see the architect’s plans for a heroic display of Jones’s tomb knocked on the head by some “practical man,” some worthy dunce in the Navy Department, whom I can imagine as protesting:  “But no!  We can’t take up space at the center of the chapel for any such purpose.  It must be floored over to make room for pews.  Otherwise where will the cadets sit?”