you can pay a compliment to a lady, in passing, and she will hear you.’  This was nothing in itself; but here was a man wrestling with fate in a cellar, who could turn you out two hundred such paragraphs a week, the year round.  Men can growl in a cellar; this man could laugh, and keep laughing, and make the floating population of a city laugh with him.  It must be owned, too, that he had a little real insight into the nature of things around him—­a little Scotch sense, as well as an inexhaustible fund of French vivacity.  Alluding, once, to the ‘hard money’ cry by which the lying politicians of the day carried elections, he exploded that nonsense in two lines:  ’If a man gets the wearable or the eatable he wants, what cares he if he has gold or paper money?’ He devoted two sentences to the Old School and New School Presbyterian controversy:  ’Great trouble among the Presbyterians just now.  The question is whether or not a man can do any thing toward saving his own soul.’  He had also an article upon the Methodists, in which he said that the two religions nearest akin were the Methodist and the Roman Catholic.  We should add to these trifling specimens the fact that he uniformly maintained, from 1835 to the crash of 1837, that the prosperity of the country was unreal, and would end in disaster.”

These things served the end for which they were intended.  They brought “The Herald” conspicuously before the public.  While engaged in them, the proprietor was anxiously planning the means of making his paper a great newspaper.  He worked sixteen or seventeen hours each day.  He rose before five o’clock in the morning, and gave three hours to writing his editorials and the witty paragraphs to which allusion has been made.  At eight o’clock he went to his cellar, or “office,” and was at his post there during the morning, selling his papers, receiving advertisements, and often writing them for those who were not able to prepare them, doing such other work as was necessary, and finishing his editorial labors.  At one o’clock he went into Wall Street, gathering up financial news and interesting items of the street.  He returned to his office at four o’clock, and remained there until six, when the business of the day was over.  In the evening he went to the theater, a ball, concert, or some public gathering, to pick up fresh items for his paper.

All this while, however, he was losing money.  He had a heavy load to carry, and though he bore it unflinchingly and determinedly, the enterprise seemed doomed to failure for lack of funds.  At this juncture, he resolved to make the financial news of the day a special feature of “The Herald.”  The monetary affairs of the country were in great confusion—­a confusion which was but the prelude to the crash of 1837; and Wall Street was the vortex of the financial whirlpool whose eddies were troubling the whole land.  Every body was anxious to get the first news from the street, and to get it as full and reliable as possible.  At