picturesque figures.

* * * * *

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