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

SUNRISE AT 222 WILLIAM STREET

27

and the buyer. So long as the merchant kept his name
regularly in print, he felt that was enough.
The leading article on the first page was a semihumorous story about an Irish captain and his duels.
It was flanked by a piece of reprint concerning microscopic carved toys. There was a paragraph about a. Vermont boy so addicted to whistling that he fell ill of it.
Mr. Day's apprentice may have needed this warning.
The front-page advertising, culled from other newspapers and printed for effect, consisted of the notices
of steamship sailings. In one of these Commodore
Vanderbilt offered to carry passengers from New York
to Hartford, by daylight, for one dollar, on his splendid
low-pressure steamboat Water Witch. Cornelius Vanderbilt was then thirty-nine years old, and had made the
boat line between New York and New Brunswick, New
Jersey, pay him forty thousand dollars a year. When
the Sun started, the commodore was at the height of his
activity, and he stuck to the water for thirty years afterward, until he had accumulated something like forty
million dollars.
E. K. Collins had not yet established his famous Dramatic line of clipper-ships between New York and Liverpool, but he advertised the " very fast sailing coppered
ship Nashville for New Orleans." He was only thirty
then.
Cooks were advertised for by private families living
in Broadway, near Canal Street-pretty far up-town
to live at that day-and in Temple Street, near Liberty,
pretty far down-town now.
On the second page was a bit of real news, the melancholy suicide of a young Bostonian of " engaging manners and amiable disposition," in Webb's Congress Hall,
a hotel. There were also two local anecdotes; a paragraph to the effect that " the city is nearly full of