has been deeply marked. The good, the beautiful, the lovely, in a New York paper, is very rarely "news"; it is considered as fake, bunkum, humbug, a pose; it is looked at askance, regarded with suspicion, as assumed by someone for the purpose of a "deal"; it is rarely worth its space, at any rate. A reporter finds himself in a cynical school; he is lucky if he escape in the end with a single rag of illusion to his back. If he has believed, up to the age of twenty-one, as I did, that the large majority of people are decent, kindly, honest folk, he will probably lose even that last single rag. On the Evening Sun, certainly, it was not the good, the beautiful, the clean, that constituted the most interesting news and got scare headlines and extra editions. I give, of course, merely the impression made upon my own mind and type, coloured as these were, some thirty years ago, by a characteristically ignorant and innocent upbringing....
The important newspapers, in those days, were all "down town," grouped about Park Row, and the shabby, tumble-down building of the Sun was not imposing. The World and Times towered above it; the Morning Advertiser, the Evening Telegram, even the Recorder were better housed; the Journal had not yet brought W. R. Hearst's methods from San Francisco. For all its humble offices, the Sun was, perhaps, the greatest power in the city. It was openly Tammany; it had a grand, courageous editor, Charles A. Dana. "Charles A." was an imposing figure, a man of immense ability, a "crank" perhaps in certain ways, but a respected chief of outstanding character and fearless policy.... My own chief, however, was W. C. McCloy, and the offices where he reigned as managing editor were housed on the top floor of the rickety building, with the machinery making such a din and roar and clatter that we had to shout to make ourselves heard at all. Metal sheets that clanged and pinged as we walked on them covered the floors. It was amid this pandemonium I had my first interview with him. An iron spiral staircase led from the quiet work-*rooms
of the Morning Sun, on the first floor, to the dark,
