Explore "The Marrow of Tradition" by Charles W. Chesnutt on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Carteret fished from the depths of the wastebasket and handed to the general an eighteen by twenty-four sheet, poorly printed on cheap paper, with a "patent" inside, a number of advertisements of proprietary medicines, quack doctors, and fortune-tellers, and two or three columns of editorial and local news. Candor compels the admission that it was not an impressive sheet in any respect, except when regarded as the first local effort of a struggling people to make public expression of their life and aspirations. From this point of view it did not speak at all badly for a class to whom, a generation before, newspapers, books, and learning had been forbidden fruit.
"It's an elegant specimen of journalism, isn't it? " laughed the general, airily. "Listen to this 'ad': --