writer for the press, came to Horace Greeley, and, exhibiting a fifty-dollar bill and some other notes of smaller denominations as his cash capital, wanted him to join in setting up a new daily paper, ‘The New York Herald.’  Our hero declined the offer, but recommended James Gordon to apply to another printer, naming one, who he thought would like to share in such an enterprise.  To him the editor of ‘The Herald’ did apply, and with success.”

The parties to whom Mr. Greeley referred Mr. Bennett were two young printers, whom he persuaded, after much painstaking, to print his paper and share with him its success or failure.  He had about enough cash in hand to sustain the paper for ten days, after which it must make its own way.  He proposed to make it cheap—­to sell it at one penny per copy, and to make it meet the current wants of the day.  The “Sun,” a penny paper, was already in existence, and was paying well, and this encouraged Mr. Bennett to hope for success in his own enterprise.

He rented a cellar in Wall Street, in which he established his office, and on the 6th of May, 1835, issued the first number of “The Morning Herald.”  His cellar was bare and poverty-stricken in appearance.  It contained nothing but a desk made of boards laid upon flour barrels.  On one end of this desk lay a pile of “Heralds” ready for purchasers, and at the other sat the proprietor writing his articles for his journal and managing his business.  Says Mr. William Gowans, the famous Nassau-Street bookseller:  “I remember to have entered the subterranean office of its editor early in its career, and purchased a single copy of the paper, for which I paid the sum of one cent United States currency.  On this occasion the proprietor, editor, and vendor was seated at his desk, busily engaged in writing, and appeared to pay little or no attention to me as I entered.  On making known my object in coming in, he requested me to put my money down on the counter and help myself to a paper, all this time he continuing his writing operations.  The office was a single oblong underground room; its furniture consisted of a counter, which also served as a desk, constructed from two flour barrels, perhaps empty, standing apart from each other about four feet, with a single plank covering both; a chair, placed in the center, upon which sat the editor busy at his vocation, with an inkstand by his right hand; on the end nearest the door were placed the papers for sale.”

[Illustration:  HOW THE “NEW YORK HERALD” BEGAN.]

Standing on Broadway now, and looking at the marble palace from which the greatest and wealthiest newspaper in the Union sends forth its huge editions, one finds it hard to realize that just thirty-four years ago this great journal was born in a cellar, an obscure little penny sheet, with a poor man for its proprietor.  Yet such was the beginning of “The New York Herald.”