ention,
but the pleasant gossip of the day was entirely ignored. It was
then necessary for the correspondent of a paper in a northern city
to mail his letter at the post-office before twelve o'clock at
night to insure its departure by the early morning's mail northward.
Letters written to New York did not, consequently, appear until
the second day after they were written, while those sent to Boston
rarely appeared before the fourth day. The people then were better
posted as to what transpired at the Nation's Capital than they are
now, when dispatches can be sent in a few moments at any time of
day or night.

Mrs. Anne Royall began an enterprise in personal literature. She
managed to secure an old Ramage printing-press and a font of battered
long-primer type, with which, aided by runaway apprentices and
tramping journeymen printers, she published, on Capitol Hill, for
several years, a small weekly sheet called the _Huntress_. Every
person of any distinction who visited Washington received a call
from Mrs. Royall, and if they subscribed for the _Huntress_ they
were described in the next number in a complimentary manner, but
if they declined she abused them without mercy. When young she
was a short, plump, and not bad-looking woman, but as she advanced
in years her flesh disappeared, and her nose seemed to increase in
size; but her piercing black eyes lost none of their fire, while
her tongue wagged more abusively when her temper was roused. John
Quincy Adams described her as going about "like a virago-errant in
enchanted armor, redeeming herself from the cramps of indigence by
the notoriety of her eccentricities and the forced currency they
gave to her publications."

Mrs. Royall's tongue at last became so unendurable that she was
formally indicted by the Grand Jury as a common scold, and was
tried in the Circuit Court before Judge Cranch. His Honor charged
the jury at length, reviewing the testimony and showing that, if
found guilty, she must be ducked, in accordance with the English
law in force in the District of Columbia. The jury found her
guilty, but her counsel begged his Honor, the Judge, to weigh the
matter and not be the first to introduce a ducking-stool. The plea
prevailed and she was let off with a fine.

The first "Society Letters," as they were called, written from
Washington, were by Nathaniel P. Willis, to the New York _Mirror_.
Willis was at that time a foppish, slender young man, with a
p