It did not take me long to discover that there was plenty of material in Washington for the Napoleon sketch. Mr. Hubbard had the latest books and pamphlets. It was easy to arrange that I have proofs from Paris of two or three volumes of reminiscences that had been announced. In the State Department I found the full Napoleonic correspondence published by the order of the French Government. Files of all the leading French newspapers of the period were in one library or another. In the Congressional Library there was a remarkable collection of books gathered by Andrew D. White when he was minister to Germany from 1879 to 1881, the bulk of them in German, French, and English. An item of this collection not to be duplicated was some fifty volumes of pamphlets in several different languages made in Germany during the Revolution and covering the Napoleonic era. They were for the most part the hasty agitated outbreaks of _vox populi_—protests, arguments, prophecies, curious personal adventures—but among them were rare bits. Taken as a whole they reflected the contemporary state of mind of the people of Europe as did nothing I had ever seen. Convinced of the adequacy of material, I reluctantly gave up Paris and settled down to work in the Congressional Library. It was not so easy to find a writing table there in the early nineties, and it took some persuasion to convince the ruler of the place, Ainsworth Spofford, that I was worth the effort, that is that I was there to use his books day in and day out until my task was done. Certain of that, he tucked me in, though stacks of books rising from floor to ceiling had to be moved to find room.