l manor,
for, with its surrounding lands, it has come into the possession of
Johns Hopkins University. The fields of Homewood now form the campus and
grounds of that excellent seat of learning, and the trustees of the
university have not merely preserved the residence, using it as a
faculty club, but have had the inspiration to find in it the
architectural motif for the entire group of new college buildings, so
that the campus may be likened to a bracelet wrought as a setting for
this jewel of a house.

CHAPTER VII

A RARE OLD TOWN

The drive from Baltimore to the sweet, slumbering city of Annapolis is
over a good road, but through barren country. Taken in the crisp days of
autumn, by a northern visitor sufficiently misguided to have supposed
that beyond Mason and Dixon's Line the winters are tropical it may prove
an uncomfortable drive--unless he be able to borrow a fur overcoat. It
was on this drive that my disillusionment concerning the fall and winter
climate of the South began, for, wearing two cloth overcoats, one over
the other, I yet suffered agonies from cold. The sun shone down upon the
open automobile in which we tore along, but its rays were no competitors
for the biting wind. Through lap robes, cloth caps, and successive
layers of clothing, and around the edges of goggles, fine little frozen
fangs found their way, like the pliable beaks of a race of gigantic,
fabulous mosquitoes from the Arctic regions. I have driven an open car
over the New England snows for miles in zero weather, and been warm by
comparison, because I was prepared.

My former erroneous ideas as to the southern climate may be shared by
others, and it is therefore well, perhaps, to enlarge a little bit upon
the subject. Never, except during a winter passed in a stone
tile-floored villa on the island of Capri, whither I went to escape the
cold, have I been so conscious of it, as during fall, winter, and spring
in the South.

In the hotels of the South one may keep warm in cold weather, but in
private homes it is not always possible to do so, for the popular
illusion that the "sunny South" is of a uniformly temperate climate in
the winter persists nowhere more violently than in the South itself.
Many a house in Virginia, let alone the other States farther down the
map, is without a furnace, and winter life in such houses, with their
ineffectual wood fires, is like life in a refrigerator tempered by the
glow of a safety match. A