CHAPTER VI

MOSES Y. BEACH’S ERA OF HUSTLE

_“The Sun” Uses Albany Steamboats, Horse Expresses, Trotting Teams, Pigeons, and the Telegraph to Get News.--Poe’s Famous Balloon Hoax and the Case of Mary Rogers._

The second owner of the _Sun_, Moses Yale Beach, was, like Ben Day, a Yankee. He was born in the old Connecticut town of Wallingford on January 7, 1800. He had a little education in the common schools, but showed more interest in mechanics than in books. When he was fourteen he was bound out to a cabinet-maker in Hartford. His skill was so fine that he saw the needlessness of serving the customary seven years, and his industry so great that he was able, by doing extra work in odd times, to get together enough money to buy his freedom from his master. He set up a cabinet-shop of his own at Northampton, Massachusetts.

When Beach was twenty, he made the acquaintance of Miss Nancy Day, of Springfield, the sister of Benjamin was the inventor of the Ben Day process used in Day were married in 1821, and as the business at Northampton was not prospering, they settled down in Springfield.

The young man was a good cabinet-maker, but his mind ran to inventions rather than to chests and high-boys. Steamboat navigation had not yet attained a commercial success, but Beach was a close student of the advance made by Robert Fulton and Henry Bell. First, however, he devoted his talents as an inventor to a motor in which the power came from explosions of gunpowder. He tried this on a boat which he intended to run on the Connecticut River between Springfield and Hartford. When it failed, he turned back to steam, and he undoubtedly would have made a success of this boat line if his money resources had been adequate.

Beach then invented a rag-cutting machine for use in paper-mills, and he might have had a fortune out of it if he had taken a patent in time, for the process is still used. As it was, the device enabled him to get an interest in a paper-mill at Saugerties, New York, where he removed in 1829. This mill was prosperous for some years, but in 1835 Beach found it more profitable to go to work for his young brother-in-law, Mr. Day, who had by this time brought the _Sun_ to the point of assured success.

Beach was a great help to Day, not only as the manager of the _Sun’s_ finances, but as general supervisor of the mechanical department. In the three years of his association with Day he picked up a good working knowledge of the newspaper business. He recognized the features that had made the _Sun_ successful--chiefly the presentation of news that interested the ordinary reader--and saw the neglect of this policy was keeping the old-fashioned sixpenny papers at a standstill.

He did not underestimate other news. “Other news,” in that day, meant the proceedings of Congress and the New York State Legislature, the condensed news of Europe, as received from a London correspondent or rewritten from the English journals, and such important items as might be clipped from the newspapers of the South and West. Many of these American papers sent proof-sheets of news articles to the _Sun_ by mail.

When Beach bought the paper there was no express service. There had been, in fact, no express service in America except the one which Charles Davenport and N. S. Mason operated over the Boston and Taunton Railway. But in March, 1839, about a year after Beach got the _Sun_, William F. Harnden began an express service--later the Adams Express Company--between New York and Boston, using the boats from New York to Providence and the rail from Providence to Boston.

This was a big help to the New York papers, for with the aid of the express the English papers brought by ships landing at Boston were in the New York offices the next day. To a city which still lacked wire communication of any kind this was highly important, and there was hardly an issue of the _Sun_ in the spring of 1839 that did not contain a paragraph laudatory of Mr. Harnden’s enterprise.

The steamship, still a novelty, was the big thing in newspaperdom. While the _Sun_ did not neglect the police-court reports and the animal stories so dear to its readers, the latest news from abroad usually had the place of honour on the second page. The first page remained the home of the advertisement and the haunt of the miscellaneous article. It was by ship that _Sun_ readers learned of Daguerre and his picture-taking device; of Cobden and the Anti-Corn-Law League; of the war between Abd-el-Kader and the French; of Don Carlos and his ups and downs--mostly downs; of the first British invasion of Afghanistan. There was the young queen, Victoria, always interesting, and there were the doings of actors known to America:

At the queen’s desire, her tutor, Dr. Davys--father to the Miss Davys whose ears the queen boxed--has been appointed Bishop of Marlborough.

Charles Kean’s friends say he has been offered the sum of sixty pounds a night for sixty nights in New York.

On June 1, 1839, the _Sun_ got out an extra on the arrival, at three o’clock that morning, of the Great Western, after a passage of thirteen days--the fastest trip up to that time--and fifty-seven thousand copies of the paper were sold. The _Sun’s_ own sailing vessels met the incoming steamships down the bay. The _Sun_ boasted:

In consequence of our news-boat arrangements we receive our papers more than an hour earlier than any other paper in this city. On the arrival of the Liverpool [July 1, 1839], we proceeded to issue an extra, which will reach Albany with the news twelve hours before it will be published in the regular editions of their evening papers, and twenty-four hours ahead of the morning papers.

The _Sun_ had woodcuts made of all the leading ships, and these, with their curly waves, lit up a page wonderfully, if not beautifully. When the British Queen arrived on July 28, 1839, there was a half-page picture of her. She was the finest ship that had ever been built in Great Britain, with her total length of two hundred and seventy-five feet--less than one-third as much as some of the modern giants--and her paddle-wheels with a diameter of thirty-one feet. Small wonder that the _Sun_ favoured New York with a Sunday paper in honour of the event, and that the Monday sale, with the same feature, was forty-nine thousand. Quoth the _Sun_:

Who will wonder, after this, that the lazy, lumbering _lazaroni_ of Wall Street stick up their noses at us?

In January, 1840, when the packet-ships United States and England arrived together, the _Sun_ gave the story a front-page display, and actually used full-faced type for the subheads of the article.

A tragedy is recalled in one paragraph of the _Sun’s_ account of the arrival of the Great Western on April 26, 1841:

Up to the closing of the mail from Liverpool to London on the 7th, the steamer President had not arrived.

The President never arrived, and her fate is one of the secrets of the sea. She sailed from New York on March 11, 1841, with thirty-one passengers, including Tyrone Power, the Irish actor, who had just concluded his second American tour. It is conjectured that the President sank during the great gale that sprang up her second night out.

In getting news from various parts of the United States, the _Sun_ took a leaf from the book of Colonel Webb and other journalists who had used the horse express. In January, 1841, on the occasion of Governor William H. Seward’s message to the Legislature, the _Sun_ beat the town. The Legislature received the message at 11 A.M. on January 5:

An express arriving exclusively for the _Sun_ then started, it being one o’clock, and at six this morning reached our office, thus enabling us to repeat the triumph achieved by us last year over the whole combined press of New York, large and small. It is but just to say that our express was brought on by the horses of the Red Bird Line with unparalleled expedition, in spite of wind, hail, and rain.

Nowadays a Governor’s message is in the newspaper-offices days before it is sent to the Legislature, and there, treated in the confidence that is never betrayed by a decent newspaper, it is prepared for printing, so that it may be on the street five minutes after it is delivered, if its importance warrants. In the old days the message, borne by relays of horse vehicles down the snow-covered post-road from Albany to New York, was more important to the newspapers than the messages of this period appear to be. With newspapers, as with humans, that which is easy to get loses value.

In October, 1841, the _Sun_ spent money freely to secure a quick report of the momentous trial of Alexander McLeod for the murder of Amos Durfee. War between the United States and Great Britain hinged on the outcome. During the rebellion in Upper Canada, in 1837, the American steamer Caroline was used by the insurgents to carry supplies down the Niagara River to a party of rebels on Navy Island. A party of loyal Canadians seized and destroyed the Caroline at Grand Island, and in the fight Durfee and eleven others were killed. The Canadian, McLeod, who boasted of being a participant, was arrested when he ventured across the American border in 1840.

The British government made a demand for his release, insisting that what McLeod had done was an act of war, performed under the orders of his commanding officer, Captain Drew. President Van Buren replied that the American government had several times asked the British government whether the destruction of the Caroline was an act of war, and had never received a reply; and further, that the Federal government had no power to prevent the State of New York from trying persons indicted within its jurisdiction.

The whole country realized the hostile attitude of the British ministry, and accepted its threat that war would be declared if McLeod were not released. The trial took place at Utica, New York, and the _Sun_ printed from two to five columns a day about it. It ran a special train from Utica to Schenectady. There a famous driver, Otis Dimmick, waited with a fine team of horses to take the story to the Albany boat, the fastest means of transportation between the State capital and the metropolis. The _Sun_ declared that one day Dimmick and his horses made the sixteen miles between Schenectady and Albany in forty-nine minutes.

And the end of it all was proof that McLeod, who had boasted of killing “a damned Yankee,” had been asleep in Chippewa on the night of the Caroline affair, and was nothing worse than a braggart. So the war-cloud blew over.

Beach was a man of great faith in railroads and all other forms of progress. When the Boston and Albany road was finished, the _Sun_ related how a barrel of flour was growing in the field in Canandaigua on a Monday--the barrel in a tree and the flour in the wheat--and on Wednesday, transformed and ready for the baker, it was in Boston.

Sperm candles manufactured by Mr. Penniman at Albany on Wednesday morning were burning at Faneuil Hall and at the Tremont, in Boston, on the evening of the same day.

The _Sun_ had faith in Morse and his telegraph from the outset. The invention was born in Nassau Street, only a block or two from the _Sun’s_ office. Morse put the wire into practical use between Baltimore and Washington on May 24, 1844. That was a Friday. The _Sun_ said nothing about it the next day, and had no Sunday paper; but on Monday it said editorially:

MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH--The new invention is completed from Baltimore to Washington. The wire, perfectly secured against the weather by a covering of rope-yarn and tar, is conducted on the top of posts about twenty feet high and one hundred yards apart. The nominations of the convention this day are to be conveyed to Washington by this telegraph, where they will arrive in a few seconds. On Saturday morning the batteries were charged and the regular transmission of intelligence between Washington and Baltimore commenced.... At half past 11 A.M., the question being asked, what was the news at Washington, the answer was almost instantaneously returned: “Van Buren stock is rising.” This is indeed the annihilation of space.

It is hardly necessary to say that the convention referred to was the Democratic national convention at Baltimore, that Van Buren’s stock, high early in the proceedings, fell again, and that James K. Polk was the nominee.

But as New York was not fortunate enough to have the first commercial telegraph-line, the _Sun_ had to rely on its own efforts for speedy news from the convention. It ran special trains from Baltimore, “beating the United States mail train and locomotive an hour or two.”

The _Sun_ soon afterward expressed annoyance at a report that it was itself a part of a monopoly which was to control the telegraph, and that it had bought a telegraph-line from New York to Springfield, Massachusetts. It insisted that there should be no monopoly, and that the use of the telegraph must be open to all. There was no suggestion that Morse intended to control his invention improperly, but the _Sun_ was not quite satisfied with the government’s lassitude. Morse had offered his rights to the government for one hundred thousand dollars, and Congress had sneered.

It was not until 1846 that the telegraph was extended to New York, and in the meantime the New York papers used such other means as they could for the collection of news. Besides trains, ships, horses, and the fleet foot of the reporter, there were pigeons. Beach went in for pigeons extensively. When the _Sun_ moved from 156 Nassau Street, in the summer of 1842, it took a six-story building at the southwest corner of Nassau and Fulton Streets, securing about three times as much room as it had in the two-story building at Spruce Street. On the top of the new building Beach built a pigeon-house, which stood for half a century.

The strange, boxlike cote attracted not only the attention of Mr. Bennett, whose _Herald_ was quartered just across the street, but of all the folk who came and went in that busy region. So many were the queries from friends and the quips from enemies concerning the pigeon-house that the _Sun_ (December 14, 1843), vouchsafed to explain:

Why, we have had a school of carrier-pigeons in the upper apartments of the _Sun_ office since we have occupied the building. Did our contemporaries believe that we ever could be at fault in furnishing the earliest news to our readers? Or did they indulge the hope that in newspaper enterprise they could ever catch us napping?

Carrier-pigeons have long been remarked for their sagacity and admired for their usefulness. They are, of all birds, the most invaluable, and as auxiliary to a newspaper cannot be too highly prized. Part of the flock in our possession were employed by the London _Morning Chronicle_ in bringing intelligence from Dublin to London, and from Paris to London, crossing both channels; therefore they are not novices in the newspaper express.

If there was delay in the arrival of the Boston steamer, and the weather clear, we despatched our choice pigeon, Sam Patch, down the Sound, and he invariably came back with a slip of delicate tissue-paper tied under his wing, containing the news. We thus are apprised of the arrival of the steamer some two hours before any one else hears of her. Our men are at their cases; the steam is up in our pressroom, and our extras are always out first.

We sometimes let one of our carriers fly to the Narrows, and in twenty minutes or so we know what is coming in, thirty miles from Sandy Hook Light. We despatch them as far as Albany, on any important mission; frequently to New Jersey, and in the summer-time they sometimes look in at Rockaway and let us know what is going on at the pavilion. We have a small sliding door in our observatory, on the top of the _Sun_ office, through which the little aerials pass. By sending off one every little while, we ascertain the details of whatever is important or interesting at any given point.

They often fly at the rate of sixty miles an hour, easy! For example, a half-dozen will leave Washington at daylight this morning and arrive here about noon, beating the mail generally ten hours or so. They can come through from Albany in about two hours and a half, solar time. They fly exceedingly high, and keep so until they make the spires of the city, and then descend. We have not lost one by any accident, and believe ours is the only flock of value or importance in the country.

We give this brief detail of “them pigeons” because our prying friends and neighbors in the newspaper way have such a meager, guesswork account of them; and because we dislike any mystery or artifice in our business operations.

Speed and more speed was the newspaper demand of the hour, particularly among the penny papers. The _Sun_ and the _Herald_ had been battling for years, with competitors springing up about them, usually to die within the twelvemonth. Now the _Tribune_ had come to remain in the fray, even if it had not as much money to spend on news-gathering as the _Sun_ and the _Herald_.

Edgar Allan Poe saw the fever that raged among the rivals. He had just returned to New York from Philadelphia with his sick wife and his mother. He was a recognized genius, but his worldly wealth amounted to four dollars and fifty cents. He had written “The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Gold Bug,” and other immortal stories, but his livelihood had been precarious. He had been in turn connected with the _Southern Literary Messenger_, the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, and _Graham’s Magazine_, and had twice issued the prospectuses for new periodicals of his own, fated never to be born.

His fortunes were at their lowest when he arrived in New York on April 6, 1844. He and his family found rooms in Greenwich Street, near Cedar, now the thick of the business district. “The house is old and looks buggy,” he wrote to a friend, but it was the best he could do with less than five dollars in his pocket.

He had to have more money. The newspapers seemed to be the most available place to get it, and the _Sun_ the livest of them. Speed--that was what they wanted. They had been having ocean steamers until they were almost sick. Railroads were unromantic. Horses were an old story. The telegraph was still regarded as theory, and it hardly appealed to the imagination.

Pigeons? Perhaps there was inspiration in the sight of Sam Patch preening himself on a cornice of the _Sun’s_ building. A magnified pigeon would be an air-ship. Poe sat him down, wrote the “balloon hoax,” and sold it to Mr. Beach. It appeared in the _Sun_ of April 13, 1844.

Beneath a black-faced heading that was supplemented by a woodcut of three race-horses flying under the whips of their jockeys and the subtitle “By Express,” was the following introduction:

ASTOUNDING INTELLIGENCE BY PRIVATE EXPRESS FROM CHARLESTON, VIA NORFOLK!--THE ATLANTIC OCEAN CROSSED IN THREE DAYS!!!--ARRIVAL AT SULLIVAN’S ISLAND OF A STEERING BALLOON INVENTED BY MR. MONCK MASON.

We stop the press at a late hour to announce that by a private express from Charleston, South Carolina, we are just put in possession of full details of the most extraordinary adventure ever accomplished by man. _The Atlantic Ocean has actually been traversed in a balloon, and in the incredibly brief period of three days!_ Eight persons have crossed in the machine, among others Sir Everard Bringhurst and Mr. Monck Mason. We have barely time now to announce this most novel and unexpected intelligence, but we hope by ten this morning to have ready an extra with a detailed account of the voyage.

P. S.--The extra will be positively ready, and for sale at our counter, by ten o’clock this morning. It will embrace all the particulars yet known. We have also placed in the hands of an excellent artist a representation of the “Steering Balloon,” which will accompany the particulars of the voyage.

The promised extra bore a head of stud-horse type, six banks in all, and as many inches deep.

“Astounding News by Express, _via_ Norfolk!” it announced. “The Atlantic Crossed in Three Days!--Signal Triumph of Mr. Monck Mason’s Flying-Machine!!!--Arrival at Sullivan’s Island, Near Charleston, of Mr. Mason, Mr. Robert Holland, Mr. Henson, Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, and Four Others in the Steering Balloon Victoria, after a Passage of Seventy-Five Hours from Land to Land--Full Particulars of the Voyage!!!”

The great problem is at length solved. The air, as well as the earth and the ocean, has been subdued by science, and will become a common and convenient highway for mankind. The Atlantic has been actually crossed in a balloon! And this, too, without difficulty--without any great apparent danger--with thorough control of the machine--and in the inconceivably brief period of seventy-five hours from shore to shore!

By the energy of an agent at Charleston, South Carolina, we are enabled to be the first to furnish the public with a detailed account of this most extraordinary voyage, which was performed between Saturday, the 6th instant, at 11 A.M. and 2 P.M. on Tuesday, the 9th instant, by Sir Everard Bringhurst, Mr. Osborne, a nephew of Lord Bentinck; Mr. Monck Mason, and Mr. Robert Holland, the well-known aeronauts; Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, author of “Jack Sheppard,” _et cetera_, and Mr. Henson, the projector of the late unsuccessful flying-machine--with two seamen from Woolwich--in all, eight persons.

The particulars furnished below may be relied on as authentic and accurate in every respect, as with a slight exception they are copied verbatim from the joint diaries of Mr. Monck Mason and Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, to whose politeness our agent is indebted for much verbal information respecting the balloon itself, its construction, and other matters of interest. The only alteration in the MS. received has been made for the purpose of throwing the hurried account of our agent, Mr. Forsyth, into a connected and intelligible form.

The story that followed was about five thousand words in length. To summarize it, Monck Mason had applied the principle of the Archimedean screw to the propulsion of a dirigible balloon. The gas-bag was an ellipsoid thirteen feet long, with a car suspended from it. The screw propeller, which was attached to the car, was operated by a spring. A rudder shaped like a battledore kept the air-ship on its course.

The voyagers, according to the story, started from Mr. Osborne’s home near Penstruthal, in North Wales, intending to sail across the English Channel. The mechanism of the propeller broke, and the balloon, caught in a strong northeast wind, was carried across the Atlantic at the speed of sixty or more miles an hour. Mr. Mason kept a journal, to which, at the end of each day, Mr. Ainsworth added a postscript. The balloon landed safely on the coast of South Carolina, near Fort Moultrie.

The names of the supposed voyagers were well chosen by Poe to give verisimilitude to the hoax. Monck Mason and Robert Holland, or Hollond, were of the small party which actually sailed from Vauxhall Gardens, London, on the afternoon of November 7, 1836, in the balloon Nassau and landed at Weilburg, in Germany, five hundred miles away, eighteen hours later. Harrison Ainsworth, the novelist, was then one of the shining stars of English literary life. The others named by Poe were familiar figures of the period.

Poe adopted the plan, used so successfully by Locke in the moon hoax, of having real people do the thing that they would like to do; but there the resemblance of the two hoaxes ends, except for the technical bits that Poe was able to inject into his narrative. The moon hoax lasted for weeks; the balloon hoax for a day. Even the _Sun_ did not attempt to bolster it, for it said the second day afterward:

BALLOON--The mails from the South last Saturday night not having brought confirmation of the balloon from England, the particulars of which from our correspondent we detailed in our extra, we are inclined to believe that the intelligence is erroneous. The description of the balloon and the voyage was written with a minuteness and scientific ability calculated to obtain credit everywhere, and was read with great pleasure and satisfaction. We by no means think such a project impossible.

About a week later, when the _Sun_ was still being pounded by its contemporaries, a few of which had been gulled into rewriting the story, another editorial article on the hoax appeared:

BALLOON EXPRESS--We have been somewhat amused with the comments of the press upon the balloon express. The more intelligent editors saw its object at once. On the other hand, many of our esteemed contemporaries--those who are too ignorant to appreciate the pleasant satire--have ascribed to us the worst and basest motives. We expected as much.

The “pleasant satire” of which the _Sun_ spoke was evidently meant to hold up to view the craze of the day for speed in the transmission of news and men. Yet the _Sun_ itself, as the leader of penny journalism, had been to a great extent the cause of this craze. It had taught the people to read the news and to hanker for more.

There was another story which Poe and the _Sun_ shared--one that will outlive even the balloon hoax. Almost buried on the third page of the _Sun_ of July 28, 1841, was this advertisement in agate type:

Left her home on Sunday morning, July 25, a young lady; had on a white dress, black shawl, blue scarf, Leghorn hat, light-colored shoes, and parasol light-colored; it is supposed some accident has befallen her. Whoever will give information respecting her at 126 Nassau shall be rewarded for their trouble.

The next day the _Sun_ said in its news columns:

☞ The body of a young lady some eighteen or twenty years of age was found in the water at Hoboken. From the description of her dress, fears are entertained that it is the body of Miss Mary C. Rogers, who is advertised in yesterday’s paper as having disappeared from her home, 126 Nassau Street, on Sunday last.

The fears were well grounded, for the dead girl was Mary Cecilia Rogers, the “beautiful cigar-girl” who had been the magnet at John Anderson’s tobacco-shop at Broadway and Duane Street; the tragic figure of Poe’s story, “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” a tale which served to keep alive the features of that unsolved riddle of the Elysian Fields of Hoboken. To the _Sun_, which had then no Poe, no _Sherlock Holmes_, the murder was the text for a moral lesson:

There can be no question that she had fallen a victim to the most imprudent and reprehensible practise, which has recently obtained to a considerable extent in this city, of placing behind the counters and at the windows of stores for the sale of articles purchased exclusively by males--especially of cigar-stores and drinking-houses--young and beautiful females for the purpose of thus attracting the attention, exciting the interest (or worse still), and thus inducing the visits and consequent custom, of the other sex--especially of the young and thoughtless.

It was by being placed in such a situation, in one of the most public spots in the city, that this unfortunate girl was led into a train of acquaintances and associations which has eventually proved not only her ruin, but an untimely and violent death in the prime of youth and beauty. From being used as an instrument of cupidity--as a sort of “man-trap” to lure by her charms the gay and giddy into the path of the spendthrift and of constant dissipation--she has become the victim of the very passions and vices which her exposure to the public gaze for mercenary gain was so well calculated to engender and encourage.

The _Sun_ and the other papers might have pursued the Mary Rogers mystery further than they did had it not been that in a few weeks a more tangible tragedy presented itself, when John C. Colt, a teacher of bookkeeping, and the brother of Samuel Colt, the inventor, killed Samuel Adams, one of the leading printers of New York. Adams had gone to Colt’s lodgings at Broadway and Chambers Street to collect a bill, and Colt, who had a furious temper, murdered him with a hammer, packed the body in a box, and hired an innocent drayman to haul it down to the ship Kalamazoo, for shipment to New Orleans. This affair drove the Rogers murder out of the types, and left it for Poe to preserve in fiction with the names of the characters thinly veiled and the scene transferred to Paris.

The great social event of the town in 1842 was the visit of Charles Dickens. He had been expected for several years. In fact, as far back as October 13, 1838, the _Sun_ remarked:

Boz is coming to America. We hope he will not make a fool of himself here, like a majority of his distinguished countrymen who preceded him.

The _Sun_ got out an extra on the day when Dickens landed, but it was not in honour of Boz, but rather because of the arrival of the Britannia with a budget of foreign news. Buried in a mass of Continental paragraphs was this one:

Among the passengers are Mr. Charles Dickens, the celebrated author, and his lady.

The ship-news man never even thought to ask Dickens how he liked America. But society was waiting for Boz, and he was tossed about on a lively sea of receptions and dinners. The _Sun_ presently thought that the young author was being exploited overmuch:

Mr. Dickens, we have no doubt, is a very respectable gentleman, and we know that he is a very clever and agreeable author. He has written several books that have put the reading world in most excellent good humor. In this way he has done much to promote the general happiness of mankind, and honestly deserves their gratitude.

Having crossed the water for the purpose of traveling in America, where his works have been extensively read and admired, he is, of course, received and treated with marked civility, attention, and respect. We should be ashamed of our countrymen if it were otherwise. During his stay at Boston the citizens gave him a public dinner. At New Haven he received a similar token of kind regard. In this city a ball has been given him. All these attentions were right and proper, and as far as we can learn they have been uniformly conducted in a gentlemanly and respectable manner, becoming alike to the characters of those who gave and him who received them.

But a few penny-catchers of the press are determined to make money out of Boz. The shop-windows are stuffed with lithograph likenesses of him, which resemble the original just about as much as he resembles a horse. His own wife would not recognize them in any other way than by the word “Boz” written under them.

Then a corps of sneaking reporters, most of them fresh from London, are pursuing him like a pack of hounds at his heels to catch every wink of his eye, every motion of his hands, and every word that he speaks, to be dished up with all conceivable embellishments by pen and pencil, and published in extras, pamphlets, and handbills. To make all this trash sell well in the market, the greatest possible hurrah must be made by the papers interested in the speculations, and therefore the whole American people are basely caricatured by them, and represented as one vast mob following Dickens from place to place, and striving even to touch the hem of his garment.

That our readers at a distance may not be induced to suppose that the good people of New York are befooling themselves in this way, we beg leave to assure them that all these absurd reports are ridiculous caricatures, hatched from the prolific brains of a few reckless reporters for a few unprincipled papers. They do in truth make as great fools of themselves as they represent the public to be generally. But beyond their narrow and contemptible circle we are happy to know that Mr. Dickens is treated with that manly and sincere respect which is so justly his due, and which must convince him that he is amongst a warm-hearted people, who know both how to respect their guest and themselves.

When Dickens sailed for home, in June, the _Sun_ bade him _bon voyage_ with but a paragraph. It was more than a year afterward that it came to him again; and meanwhile he had trodden on the toes of America:

The appearance of the current number of “The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit” will not add to the happiness of retrospections. Where is that Boston committee, where the renowned getters-up of the City Hotel dinner and the ball at the Park Theater, with its _tableaux vivants_, its splendid decorations, and tickets at ten dollars each?

The scene is passing now before our memory--the crammed theater, full up to its third tier, the dense crowd opening a passage for Mr. Dickens and the proud and happy committee while he passes up the center of the stage amid huzzas and the waving of handkerchiefs, while the band is playing “God Save the Queen” and “See, the Conquering Hero Comes.” And _our_ Irving, _our_ Halleck, _our_ Bryant passed around in the crowd, unnoticed and almost unknown. Shame! Let our cheeks crimson, as they ought.

The _Sun_ itself was doing very nicely. On its tenth birthday, September 3, 1843, it announced that it employed eight editors and reporters, twenty compositors, sixteen pressmen, twelve folders and counters, and one hundred carriers. The circulation of the daily paper was thirty-eight thousand, of the _Weekly Sun_ twelve thousand.

Mr. Beach owned the _Sun’s_ new home at Fulton and Nassau Streets and the building at 156 Nassau Street which he had recently vacated, and which was burned down in the fire of February 6, 1845. He had a London correspondent who ran a special horse express to carry the news from London to Bristol. A _Sun_ reporter went to report Webster’s speech on the great day when the Bunker Hill Monument was finished. He got down correctly at least the last sentence: “Thank God, I--I also--am an American!”

With a circulation by far the largest in the world, the _Sun_ was obliged to buy a new dress of type every three months, for the day of the curved stereotype plate was still far off. Early in 1846 two new presses, each capable of six thousand _Suns_ an hour, were put in at a cost of twelve thousand dollars.

The size of the paper grew constantly, although Beach stuck to a four-page sheet because of the limitations of the presses. Instead of adding pages, he added columns. From Day’s little three-column _Sun_ the paper had grown, by April of 1840, to a width of seven columns. Of the total of twenty-eight columns in an issue twenty-one and a half were devoted to advertising, three to mixed news and editorials, two and a half to the court reports, and one column to reprint.

With the page seven columns wide, Beach thought that the two words--“_The Sun_”--looked lonely, and to fill out the heading he changed it to read “_The New York Sun_.” This continued from April 13 to September 29, 1840, when the proprietor saw how much more economical it would be to cut out “New York” and push the first and seventh columns of the first page up to the top of the paper. Then it was “_The Sun_” once more in head-line as well as body.

The paper is never the _New York Sun_, Eugene Field’s poem to the contrary notwithstanding. It is the _Sun_, universal in its spirit, and published in New York by the accident of birth.

Three years after that the _Sun_ became an eight-column paper, and there were no more sneers at the blanket sheets, for the _Sun_ itself was getting pretty wide.

It was in the reign of Moses Y. Beach as owner of the _Sun_, that Horace Greeley came to stay in New York journalism. He had been fairly successful as editor of the _New Yorker_, and his management of the campaign paper called the _Log Cabin_, issued in 1840 in the interest of General Harrison, was masterly. With the prestige thus obtained, he was able, on April 10, 1841, to start the _Tribune_.

In the first number he announced his intention of excluding the police reports which had been so valuable to “our leading penny papers”--meaning the _Sun_ and the _Herald_--and of making the _Tribune_ “worthy of the hearty approval of the virtuous and refined.” It was a week before the _Sun_ mentioned its former friend, and then it was only to say:

A word to Horace Greeley--if he wishes us to write him or any of his sickly brood of newspapers into notice, he must first go to school and learn a little decency. He must further retract the dirty, malignant, and wholesale falsehood which he procured to be published in the Albany _Evening Journal_ a year ago last winter, with the hope of injuring the _Sun_. He must then deal in something besides misstatements of facts.... Until he does all this we shall feel very indifferent to any thrusts that he can make at us with his dagger of lath.

Soon afterward the _Sun_ rubbed it in by quoting the Albany _Evening Journal_:

Galvanize a large New England squash, and it would make as capable an editor as Horace.

But Greeley was a lively young man, in spite of his eccentric ways and his habit of letting one leg of his trousers hang out of his unpolished boots. Only thirty when he started the _Tribune_, he had had a lot of experience, particularly with politicians and with fads. He still believed in some of the fads, including temperance--which was then considered a fad--vegetarianism, and Abolition. He had been, too, a poet; and his verses lived to haunt his mature years. He had to give away most of the five thousand copies that were printed of the first number of the _Tribune_, but in a month he had a circulation of six thousand, and in two months he doubled this.

Greeley had the instinct for getting good men, but not always the knack of holding them. One of his early finds was Henry J. Raymond, who attracted his attention as a boy orator for the Whig cause. Raymond worked for Greeley’s _New Yorker_ and later for the _Tribune_. He was a good reporter, using a system of shorthand of his own devising.

On one occasion, at least, he enabled the _Tribune_ to beat the other papers. He was sent to Boston to report a speech, and he took with him three printers and their cases of type. After the speech Raymond and his compositors boarded the boat for New York, and as fast as the reporter transcribed his notes the printers put the speech into type. On the arrival of the boat at New York the type was ready to be put into the forms, and the _Tribune_ was on the street hours ahead of its rivals.

Greeley paid Raymond eight dollars a week until Raymond threatened to leave unless he received twenty dollars a week. He got it, but Greeley made such a fuss about the matter that Raymond realized that further increases would be out of the question. Presently he went to the _Courier and Enquirer_, and from 1843 to 1850 he tried to restore some of the glory that once had crowned Colonel Webb’s paper.

In this period Raymond and his former employer, Greeley, fought their celebrated editorial duel--with pens, not mahogany-handled pistols--on the subject of Fourierism, that theory of social reorganization which Greeley seemed anxious to spread, and which was zealously preached by another of his young men, Albert Brisbane, now perhaps better remembered as the father of Arthur Brisbane. But Colonel Webb’s paper would not wake wide enough to suit the ambitious Raymond, who seized the opportunity of becoming the first editor of the New York _Times_.

Other men who worked for Greeley’s _Tribune_ in its young days were Bayard Taylor, who wrote articles from Europe; George William Curtis, the essayist; Count Gurowski, an authority on foreign affairs; and Charles A. Dana.

Beach soon recognized Greeley as a considerable rival in the morning field, and there was a long tussle between the _Sun_ and the _Tribune_. It did not content itself with words, and there were street battles between the boys who sold the two papers. Stung by one of Beach’s articles, Greeley called the _Sun_ “the slimy and venomous instrument of Locofocoism, Jesuitical and deadly in politics and grovelling in morals.” The term Locofoco had then lost its original application to the Equal Rights section of the Democratic party and was applied--particularly by the Whigs--to any sort of Democrat.

Moses Y. Beach had no such young journalists about him as Dana or Raymond, but he had two sons who seemed well adapted to take up the ownership of the _Sun_. He took them in as partners on October 22, 1845, under the title of “M. Y. Beach & Sons.” The elder son, Moses Sperry Beach, was then twenty-three years old, and had already been well acquainted with the newspaper business, particularly with the mechanical side of it. Before his father took him as a partner, young Moses had joined with George Roberts in the publication of the Boston _Daily Times_, but he was glad to drop this and devote himself to the valuable property at Fulton and Nassau Streets.

If a genius for invention is inheritable, both the Beach boys were richly endowed by their father. Moses S. invented devices for the feeding of rolls of paper, instead of sheets, to flat presses; for wetting news-print paper prior to printing; for cutting the sheets after printing; and for adapting newspaper presses to print both sides of the sheet at the same time.

Alfred Ely Beach was only nineteen when he became partner in the _Sun_. After leaving the academy at Monson, Massachusetts, where he had been schooled, he worked with his father in the _Sun_ office, and learned every detail of the business. The inventive vein was even deeper in him than in his brother. When he was twenty he formed a partnership with his old schoolmate, Orson D. Munn, of Monson, and they bought the _Scientific American_ from Rufus Porter and combined its publishing business with that of soliciting patents.

Alfred Beach retained his interest in the _Sun_ for several years, but he is best remembered for his inventions and for his connection with scientific literature. In 1853 he devised the first typewriter which printed raised letters on a strip of paper for the blind. He invented a pneumatic mail-tube, and a larger tube on the same principle, by which he hoped passengers could be carried, the motive power being the exhaustion of air at the far end by means of a rotating fan.

He was the first subway-constructor in New York. In 1869 he built a tunnel nine feet in diameter under Broadway from Warren Street to Murray Street, and the next year a car was sent to and fro in this by pneumatic power. A more helpful invention, however, was the Beach shield for tunnel-digging--a gigantic hogs-head with the ends removed, the front circular edge being sharp and the rear end having a thin iron hood. This cylinder was propelled slowly through the earth by hydraulic rams, the dislodged material being removed through the rear.

Mr. Beach was connected with the _Scientific American_ until his death in 1896. His son, Frederick Converse Beach, was one of the editors of that periodical, and his grandson, Stanley Yale Beach, is still in the same field of endeavour.