Neither of the North nor of the South, of the Old nor of the New, the fair State of Maryland possesses a thousand charms that are all her own, as she clasps the blue, river-fringed Chesapeake to her breast, and stretches out her lovely leagues of hill and vale, of field and forest and rocky glen, from where the sun rises out of the ocean beyond her “East’n Sho’” to where he sets behind the mountain ramparts of her western frontier. And of Maryland surely the heart lies in the quaint old city on the Severn, where the days are longer, the nights stiller, the sunshine more full of peace, and the moonlight more fraught with mystery than any place else in the world. To saunter through the streets of “Y^e Ancient City” of Annapolis is to take a University Extension course in American history; to gaze upon her old houses is to behold the finest type of colonial architecture; while to read her annals is to be fired with the truest patriotism and to mingle in the best society of the picturesque days of long ago. [Illustration: GEORGE CALVERT, FIRST LORD BALTIMORE. REPRODUCED FROM AN OLD PRINT.] From our New World point of view, Annapolis is very old, dating back to 1608, when Captain John Smith, exploring the Chesapeake Bay, sailed up the Severn in search of favorable sites for settlements. She is fortunate in the figures that stand on her threshold, for next after the gallant Captain come the noble Calverts--George, Cecilius, Leonard, than whom were never lordlier men. To Cecilius, pledges made to his father were redeemed when, in 1632, Charles I. made him vast grants of lands beyond the Atlantic, in return for which all that was asked was allegiance to the English Crown; one fifth of all gold and silver to be discovered in the new domain, and an annual offering, to be made at Windsor Castle on Easter Tuesday, of two Indian arrow-heads. The charter thus given was the freest ever bestowed upon any colony, and in return Lord Baltimore named his new possessions in honor of Queen Henrietta Maria, whose bigotry and arrogance had so much to do with the loss of her husband’s crown and life, and which--so strange are the relations of cause and effect--formed one of the broad foundation stones on which the modern superstructure of civil and religious freedom rests. [Illustration: CECILIUS CALVERT, SECOND LORD BALTIMORE. REPRODUCED FROM AN OLD PRINT.]