Washington was early supplied with a good general newspaper in the _National Intelligencer_, and the social side of life presently found a weekly interpreter in _The Huntress_, edited by Mrs. Ann Royall, whose personality was so aggressive that John Quincy Adams described her as going about “like a virago-errant in enchanted armor.” She said so much, also, in disparagement of some of her neighbors, that she was indicted by the grand jury as a common scold and threatened with a ducking in accordance with an old English law in force in the District. But the disseminators of information to whose coming the citizens looked forward more eagerly than to any printed sheet, were two men who made their rounds daily on horseback among the homes of the well-to-do. One was the postman, delivering the mails that came in by stage-coach from the outer world; the other was the barber, who, like an endless-chain letter, picked up the latest gossip at every house he visited, and left in exchange all the items he had picked up at previous stopping-places. During the next generation Washington saw, it is safe to say, more of the ups and downs of fortune than any other American city. The reasons were manifold. For one thing, the larger part of its population consisted of persons whose permanent ties were elsewhere. As federal officeholders they were residents of Washington, but they retained their citizenship in the places from which they had been drawn. Under the Constitution, moreover, Congress exercised supreme authority in the District of Columbia, and every member of Congress had the interests of his home constituency more at heart than those of the people who were his neighbors for only a few months at a time. Nevertheless, the population of the capital, which, when it rose from its ashes, numbered between eight and nine thousand, more than doubled within the next twenty years. Then came ten years of great uncertainty, during which occurred the overwhelming business panic of 1837, that set awry nearly everything in America, and for this period the increase averaged only about five hundred souls annually. But another twenty years of forward movement brought the total up to a little more than sixty thousand.