May a brief pause be made in this hasty chronicle to look at the great Roman Catholic foundations of Frederick which lend such an unusual aspect to the part of the town in which they stand. The long, dull façade of the Novitiate fronts the school and the beautiful church, and next that the great walls of the convent arise, shutting out the world from the still, cloistered life within. Many men eminent in the order have been part of the place--none of them more interesting, perhaps, than Father John Du Bois, who came thither in 1792. He was an _émigré_ of the French Revolution, in which his old classmates at the College of Louis-le-Grand, Camille Desmoulins and Robespierre, figured so largely, and he afterwards wore a mitre. In 1824, Lafayette included Frederick in his great tour of rejoicing, and was accorded the usual welcoming parades, speeches, dinner and ball. Only a few years ago a beautiful, blind old lady, who had been a beautiful, bright-eyed young wife, used to tell of her noble guest. She was a favorite granddaughter of Governor Johnson, and in her girlhood had helped Louisa Johnson, the wife of John Quincy Adams, to dispense the unpretentious hospitality of the White House. Mr. Adams, she said, got up and built his hearth-fire of a morning himself! It was a chapter from an old romance to listen to her kindly talk of “the old times and the days that were before us,” and when she “went away,” almost the last of the perfect breeding and high simplicity of the old, old days left Maryland forever. So much must be left out that hardly a word can be given to the Civil War, which found the old town alive with the old fervor. Not that all its sons thought alike. Sometimes the gray uniforms thronged the streets; sometimes the blue; once there was even a skirmish on the main street. In the terrible Battle Autumn of 1862, Frederick was the heart of the war. Dr. Holmes came down, after Antietam battle, to make his famous “Hunt after the Captain,” and even the sad, gaunt face of President Lincoln was seen among the rows of wounded and dying men that filled convent and church--every available space. The roads for miles in every direction were crowded with the paraphernalia of war--of hurt and of healing. [Illustration: THE OLD REFORMED CHURCH.]