m which there broke, at a point directly opposite
the portico, an avenue, straight and long as a rifle range, and lovely
as the loveliest of New England village greens. Down the middle of this
broad way, between grass borders each as wide as a great boulevard, and
double rows of patriarchal trees, ran a road which, in the old days,
continued straight to Annapolis, thirty or more miles away, where was
the town house of the builder of this manor. As it stands to-day the
avenue is less than half a mile long, but whatever its length, and
whether one look down it from the house, or up the gentle grade from the
far end, to where the converging lines of grass and foliage and sky melt
into the house, it has about it something of unreality, something of
enchantment, something of that quality one finds in the rhapsodic
landscapes of those poet painters who dream of distant shimmering
palaces and supernal vistas peopled by fauns and nymphs dancing amid the
trunks of giant trees whose luxuriant dark tops are contoured like the
cumulus white clouds floating above them.

There is nothing "baronial," nothing arrogant, about Doughoregan Manor,
for though the house is noble, its nobility, consisting in spaciousness,
simplicity, and grace combined with age, fits well into what, it seems
to me, should be the architectural ideals of a republic. No house could
be freer of unessential embellishment; in detail it is plain almost to
severity; yet the full impression that it gives, far from being austere,
is of friendliness and hospitality. An approachable sort of house, a
"homelike" house, it is perhaps less "imposing" than some other
mansions, coeval with it, in Virginia, in Annapolis, and in Charleston;
and yet it is as impressive, in its own way, as Warwick Castle, or
Hurstmonceaux, or Loches, or Chinon, or Chenonceaux, or Heidelberg--not
that it is so vast, that it has glowering battlements, or that it stuns
the eye, but for precisely opposite reasons: because it is a consummate
expression of republican cultivation, of a fine old American home, and
of the fine old American gentleman who built it, and whose descendants
inhabit it to-day: Charles Carroll of Carrollton, last to survive of
those who signed the Declaration of Independence.

The first Charles Carroll, known in the family as "the Settler," came
from Ireland in 1688, and became a great landowner in Maryland. He was a
highly educated gentleman and a Roman Catholic, as have also bee