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