The story of the Sun, New York, 1833-1918 / by Frank M. O'Brien.

DANA'S FIRST BIG NEWS MEN

289

jump for twelve-column articles on the restoration of
the American merchant marine.
He takes a keen delight in hunting for essays on civilservice reform, and will play with them, if he has time,
for hours. They are so pretty that he hates to kill
them, but duty is duty. Clumsy and awkward English
he springs at with indescribable quickness and ferocity;
but he won't eat it. He simply tears it up. He can't
stand everything.
We don't pretend he is perfect. We admit that he
has an uncontrollable appetite for the Congressional
Record. We have to keep this peculiar publication out
of his reach. He will sit for hours and watch with
burning eyes the iron safe in which we are obliged to
shut up the Record for safe-keeping. Once in a while
we let him have a number or two. He becomes uneasy
without it. It is his catnip.
With the exception of this pardonable excess he is a
blameless beast. He mouses out all the stupid stuff and
nonsense that finds its way into the office and goes for
it tooth and claw. He is the biggest copyholder in the
world. And he never gets tired. His health is good,
and we have not deemed it necessary to take out a policy
on any one of his valuable lives.
Many of our esteemed contemporaries are furnishing
their offices with cats, but they can never hope to have
the equal of the Sun's venerable polyphage. He is a cat
of genius.
The cat may have contracted his hatred of the dull
and prosy from the men who worked in the Sun office
when Amos Cummings smiled and swore and got out
the greatest four-page paper ever seen, singing the while
the song of Walker's filibusters:
How would you like a soldier's life
On the plains of Nicara-goo?
Marching away and fighting all day,
Nothing to eat and as much to payWe do it all for glory, they say,