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

THE FIELD OF THE LITTLE "SUN"

49

At the close of the present year the Treasury of the
nation will contain twelve million dollars. This rich
and increasing revenue will probably be a bone of contention at the next session of Congress.
At the end of its first month the Sun was getting more
and more advertising. Its news was lively enough, considering the times. Rum, the cholera in Mexico, assassinations in the South, the police-court, the tour of Henry
Clay, and poems by Walter Scott were its long suit.
The circulation of the little paper was now about twelve
hundred copies, and the future seemed promising, even
if Mr. Day did print, at suspiciously frequent intervals,
articles inveighing against the debtor's-prison law.
The Astor House-now half a ruin-was at first to be
called the Park Hotel, for the Sun of October 29, 1833,
announced editorially:
THE PARK HOTEL-Mr. W. B. Astor gives notice
that he will receive proposals for building the longcontemplated hotel in Broadway, between Barclay and
Vesey Streets.
An advertisement which the Sun saw fit to notice
editorially was inserted by a young man in search of
a wife —" a young woman who understands the use of
the needle, and who is willing to be industrious." The
editorial comment was:
The advertisement was handed to us by a respectablelooking young man, and of course we could not refuse
to publish it-though if we were in want of a wife we
think we should take a different course to obtain one.
Sometimes the police items, flecked with poetry, and
presumably written by Wisner, were tantalizingly
reticent, as: