vii

Sometimes it was tedious work, leafing through
one volume after another of daily newspapers without
finding a word pertaining to the subject. Then the

page would turn, and an unsuspected fact, or a sen-

tence which completed or changed a pattern would leap

out, and the seeming endless scanning of pages would be
rewarded.

Examination of the papers was interesting, too,
in another way. For the newspaper, being ephemeral,
and written only for the day on which it is published,
is bound to express the spirit, the thought cf that day
in contemporary language, as ne later composition
will do. As a result, I feel that after so long a so-
journ with newspapers of a century and a half ago, if
I were given a chance te go back in time, like the
Connecticut Yankee, I should be- quite at home in the
Baltimore of the seventeen-nineties in spite of the
absence of the Baltimore Trust Company tower, the
Transit Company vehicles, the long rows of white steps,
and a few other familiar landmarks.

Margaret Leech, author of Reveille in Washington,
has written an account of her research in "How Not to
Write History" in Harper's Magazine of March 1942, and
this is the tribute she pays to newspapers on page 383
cf that article:

They gave me the flow of life, the shape of