I also went to the Provincial Archives in the Colonial Building. I found that place harder to understand, but once I got the hang of it, I found some good things there. They give you boxes and you don't know what's going to be in them until you open them. The best thing I got there was Kate Vey's diary. It was pencilled in a brown scribbler in 1904. You can see in the main story how I used it.

The Newfoundland Studies centre at MUN has an archive too. The people who work in archives can find things for you that you could never find on your own. A woman at this archive told me the lawyer John L. Joy used to study history, and he wrote a thesis all about coopers and the other crafts and trades and factories in St. John's around 1900.

I knew John Joy. I had talked to him. But I never knew he wrote that thesis, and I never found the thesis on any of my hunts because it was listed under his name. I was looking under topics like coopering, factories and trades. I found his thesis and several papers he wrote about coopers. He had done years of work on this topic, and he had put the work together beautifully. He had done a lot more hunting than I had. His work was like a big treasure chest full of doubloons.

I phoned him and asked him if I could use his work. I felt bad because he had done so much of it. I felt like I was stealing it. But he said go ahead, that's what research is for. To help people build on each other's knowledge. He had more things too, like minutes from coopers' union meetings during the strike. I found out more about things from the coopers' point of view. John Joy was very kind, and his work was rich and deep.

Then I remembered that St. John's City Hall has an archive too. That turned out to be my favourite place to find things out, and to think about William Pender. I found out he probably lived on the South Side Hill. I could see the hill out the archives window. The archivist showed me photographs that James Vey took of St. John's in the winter of 1904. She showed me a city insurance map from 1904 that let me picture the streets William Pender walked. She gave me a glass loop that let me see the pictures close up. It let me read the signs on shop windows, and see into the dim stores. I put all those details in the story.

Finally I travelled on foot through the berry bushes to the tall stones on the South Side Hill where William Pender died. I touched the stones and made a fire. Older stories came to me, from three hundred years ago instead of one hundred. The ghosts of old French battles came out of the rocks. I visited Placentia, and saw old coins and muskets the ghosts had dropped.

By now I was getting used to going back in time. Every night when I closed my eyes I could see William Pender's world. I could see William Pender himself, with his black moustache and his cap, and his T-handled snow shovel, as he shovelled the streets with gangs of other unemployed workmen. Whenever I walked in downtown St. John's, I no longer saw it only in 1996. I saw the present as a dream that hung like a veil over a very real 1904, and a vivid 1698. I saw that what used to be there is just as real as what we see there today.