“Oh, what a horrid face! Who is it?” exclaimed Eleanor.
“The paper states it is you, my dear,” laughed her father.
“What—never! Oh, what awful people these newspaper men are! Dad, can’t you go down there and horse-whip them? I never looked like that in all my life!” and Eleanor stamped her foot in a fury.
Polly had been gazing at the two faces printed on the front sheet of the morning paper, but now she laughed. “Oh, if I looked like that picture, I could have put out the fire by merely turning my face to it!”
Anne and her mother came in when they heard Mr. Maynard’s loud laughter. They, too, stared at the oval-framed pictures said to be “The two heroines of the dreadful fire at Assembly Hall.”
“Anne, where under the sun did the newspapers get those two pictures?” asked Polly, tittering every time she saw the ovals.
“Every newspaper has a department known as the ‘morgue,’ or some such name. They keep, filed away, pictures of every well-known person in the world. In the package indexed under the proper name, are one or two ‘cuts’ ready to use in case of a hurry. Then when a person dies, or is married, or something or other happens, the newspaper rushes to its files and gets out the picture, or cut, needed.
“It is the same with famous buildings, or ships, or objects of any kind. If something comes up that brings the thing to the public attention, there the papers have the pictures all ready to print.
“Now they keep lots of photographs, just like these two, which they buy from cheap photographers. They buy a hundred in a job lot, and if they want a picture and can’t secure a legitimate one, or a snap-shot from the reporter’s kodak, they use what they have on hand.
“It would be extremely amusing to be present when these girls see their faces in the paper. It will prove almost as funny as seeing you two girls scorning these strange faces.”