His pretty daughters married men who also admired pretty women, and became the mothers of other pretty women, who became, in turn, the mothers and grandmothers of the pretty women of the South to-day.
Your old-time Annapolis gentleman's ideas of a republic were far indeed from those now current, for he understood perfectly the difference between a republic and a democracy--a difference which is not now so well understood.

He believed that the people should elect the heads of the government, but he also believed that these heads should be elected from his own class, and that, having voted, the people should go about their business, trusting their betters to run the country as it should be run.
This, at least, is my picture of the old aristocrats of Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, as conveyed to me by what I have seen of their houses and possessions and what I have read of their mode of life.
They were the early princes of the Republic and by all odds its most 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 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.