The story of the Sun, New York: 1833-1928 / by Frank M. O'Brien ; with an introduction by Edward Page Mitchell ...

THE FIELD OF THE LITTLE "SUN" 19
gah," and at one time manager of Wallack's old Broadway
Theater.
When Day got some regular subscribers, he sent carriers on routes. He charged them sixty-seven cents a
hundred, cash, or seventy-five cents on credit. The first
of these carriers was Sam Messenger, who delivered the
Sun in the Fulton Market district, and who later became
a rich livery-stable keeper. Live lads like these, carrying
out l)ay's idea, wrought the greatest change in journalism
that ever had been made, for they brought the paper
to the people.
On the third day of the Sun's life, with Wisner at the
pen and Barney Flaherty "hollering" in the startled
streets, the editor expressed his yearning that something
would happen:
We newspaper people thrive best on the calamities
of others. Give us one of your real Moscow fires,
or your Waterloo battlefields; let a Napoleon be
dashing with his legions through the world, overturning the thrones of a thousand years and deluging
the world with blood and tears; and then we of the
types are in our glory.
The yearner had to wait thirty years for another
Waterloo, but he got his "real Moscow fire" in about
two years, and so close that it singed his eyebrows.
The big story on the first page of the fourth issue of
the Sun was a conversation between Envy and Candor
in regard to the beauties of a Miss H, perhaps a fictitious person. But on the second page, at the head of
the editorial column, was a real editorial article approving the course of the British government in freeing the
slaves in the West Indies: