Page:Historic towns of the southern states (1900).djvu/105

 of them more interesting than the Great Seal, brought over by Governor Stone in 1648, and which is, substantially, the coat-of-arms of the Calverts. From the dome and the portico fine views can be obtained. There is a dignity and consequence about the building which not even the noisiest session of the Legislature can wholly dissipate; in a word, the old State House is the pride and glory of the commonwealth.

We have not even touched upon the gallant part played by the citizens of the town and the colony in the Revolution; but at last the war was over, Washington had bidden adieu to his troops in New York, and had come hither to lay in the hands of the Congress of the States, in session in the chamber in which the Treaty of Peace was to be signed a year later, his commission as Commander-in-chief of the armies. That he had been nominated to that high office by a Marylander, Thomas Johnson, who had, in 1777, become the first Governor of the State, added not a little to the interest of a scene described by every pen that writes of the times. The simplicity, manliness, pathos and true dignity of the event have never been better portrayed than in the vast painting