and so on all over the heading. Some apparent effort has been made to remove the larger stains from the altered copy, with the result that the altered copy is blurred or scratched at every single point where these stains show up clearly in the unchanged copy. It is well known to several people in Worcester that S. Millington Miller was in Worcester a short time before this article appeared in Collier's and that he visited the library of the American Antiquarian Society, and it is also known that the Society's copy of the Cape-Fear Mercury was photographed for him prior to the appearance of his article. in Collier's. The following letter will throw some light on the matter: Mr. A. S. Salley, PHOTOGRAPHERS' ASSOCIATION OF NEW ENGLAND Columbia, S. C. My Dear Sir: Your inquiry of the 11th inst. to hand. I did make a copy of the Cape Fear Mercury for S. Millington Miller, but for some reason he wanted a reverse negative made-and in doing this there might have been a slight deviation from the exact size', but in your copy I feel quite sure that the dimensions are exactly the size of the original, as I was very particular about the size. I thank you for giving me cr. for the copy in your reproduction. Very truly yours, J. CHESTER BUSHONG The metal in the electroplate loaned the writer for his pamphlet by Collier's shows up brighter where the erasures were made on Mr. Bushong's photograph or negative. The next photograph and the equally faithful half-tone made therefrom and the electroplate made from that all preserve the truth quite plainly. That the date of the genuine paper was altered for the reproduction is quite evident. "June 3RD " is not in the usual type used for printing the months in the Mercury's date-line; it is not in the same type as "November 24" in the genuine paper. The "J" and "une" are not in the same relative proportion as the "N" and "ovember". The "RD" is in small capitals, which were seldom or never used in date abbreviations in the body of a newspaper then and are not used now-always lower-case letters-and it was not the style of the Cape-Fear Mercury to use figures followed by "rd" or "th" in the date-line; a comma was all that was used, but the 1 The dimensions given by Miller in Collier's are 84 by 1334. 2 Mr. E. M. Barton, the librarian of the American Antiquarian Society, confirms Mr. Bushong. The writer has a letter from him stating that the photograph made by Mr. Bushong for the writer was made the exact size of the paper, namely, 83% by 134. RD "in small capitals appears to have been used in this case to fill up an awkward space. The "Friday" and the " 1775" occupy exactly the same positions on this paper that they do on the Antiquarian Society's paper. "June 3," is not so long as "November 24," and would leave an awkward space which the "RD" in small capitals, followed by the comma, helps to fill up for the sake of appearance. Besides, the appearance of the electroplate indicates that a change was made on the original photograph or the negative thereof before being reproduced. This does not show in the print as it does on the electroplate made from previous reproductions. The "75" in "1775" is also in a different type from the " 17 "; the "5" is awry; and the "2" in "294" is in a different type from the "9" and the "4". Another significant fact is that the copies of the Cape-Fear Mercury that are in London, issued in 1775 (e. g., plate IV.), are without the royal arms of Great Britain and the Latin motto that appear on the heading of the paper issued in 1769 that is in the library of the American Antiquarian Society. The same types were used for the title, however. Again, the types in the first two columns appended to this heading are different. The type of the Mecklenburg "Declaration" in the first column are apparently modern type, and are smaller and trimmer than the type of the second column, which are the clumsylooking type of the Revolutionary period. The second column was apparently taken from a paper published just after the Lexington and Concord fights, in April, 1775, giving the casualties of those fights. The small piece of this column preserved in the cut in Collier's is exactly-punctuation and all-like the account of those fights published in Almon's Remembrancer. But the names are in italics in the Remembrancer, and its account was doubtless copied from an earlier paper; and it was probably from that earlier paper that Miller cut the account and used the first of it to fill up his first column below his Mecklenburg "Declaration" and continued it on his second column. We are uninformed as to what constituted his third column, for the editors of Collier's cut off from their photograph all but the heading, the "Declaration" and four lines of its. alleged list of signers, and the small piece of the second column shown in the cut. Another striking coincidence is that when Miller was in Charlotte in the spring of 1905 he was shown a copy of Almon's Remembrancer containing this account of the Concord and Lexington fights, and tried to buy it. The first column, which contains only the first three of the five resolves of the alleged Mecklenburg " Declaration" of May 20, with |