Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

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MEMOIRS OF AN EDITOR

and the stockholders including himself, thus adding largely
to his personal income from an enterprise to which his
faith had clung from the beginning. The journalist whose
pay under Horace Greeley had never exceeded 82,500 a
"year was enabled for the first time to gratify his taste for
generous living. He bought Dosoris Island, connected by
a short bridge with the Long Island shore at Glen Cove
on the Sound, and made it not only a place of beauty but
also a notable arboretum of the rarities of foliage. In his
town house in upper Madison Avenue the fine examples of
the Barbizon masters, the "Danse d'Amour" of Corot,
"Le Marais aux Grenouilles" of Diaz, Millet's " Turkey
Herder," "Rousseau's "Hay Field," and Daubigny's "On
the Oise," formed a small but exceptionally representative
collection. He had also his Courbet and his Ziem, the
splendid "Bucintoro." His porcelains of the different
Oriental dynasties were known by connoisseurs to be unrivalled then in America except by the Walters ceramics
in Baltimore. He gathered these objects of art with knowledge, with taste, and with keen zest of acquisition and
possession. He was an admirable host and entertained
freely. However, the untidy editorial room at the corner
of Nassau Street and Frankfort, where perhaps he was
happiest, took on no adornment except as it grew to be
more and more the headquarters of an esprit de corps without many counterparts in newspaper history, and the
resort of peculiar and distinguished people.
In its heyday of enthusiasm for universal interest The
Sun possessed an unattached staff-so to speak-of contributors and regular visitors of a very special sort.
Outside, they were sometimes described as cranks or
semi-cranks. Inside the office they were more respectfully

regarded as gentlemen whose genius manifested itself
unconventionally. Mr. Dana's fondness for these harmless,
amusing eccentrics was almost juvenile in its inward zest,
but his attitude toward them was invariably that of dig