Here Mr. Warner spent his forenoons and did his literary work. He was very industrious, and was an unusually rapid writer. Some of his most enjoyed sketches that are apt to be quoted as specimens of his best work, peculiarly exhibiting his delicate and amiable humor and the characteristic merits of his style, were finished at a sitting. In the afternoon he was “down town” on duty as editor-in-chief of _The Hartford Courant_--the oldest newspaper in continuous existence in this country, having been founded in 1764. His associate editor-in-chief was Gen. Joseph R. Hawley, of the United States Senate. The main pursuit of Mr. Warner’s life was journalism. His native turn was literary. The ink began to stir in his veins when he was a boy. In his youth he was a contributor to the old _Knickerbocker_ and _Putnam’s Magazine_. But circumstances did not permit him to follow his bent. After graduating at college, he engaged for awhile in railroad surveying in the West; then studied, and for a short time practised, law; but finally, at the call of his friend Hawley, came to Hartford and settled down to the work of an editor, devoting his whole strength to it, with marked success from the outset, and so continued for the years before, during and after the War, supposing that as a journalist he had found his place and his career. His editorial work, however, was such as to give him a distinctly literary reputation; and a share of it was literary in form and motive. People used to preserve his Christmas stories and letters of travel in their scrap-books. The chapters of “My Summer in a Garden” were originally a series of articles written for his paper, without a thought of further publication. It was in response to numerous suggestions coming to him from various quarters that they were made into a book. The extraordinary favor with which the little volume was received was a surprise to Mr. Warner, who insisted that there was nothing in it better than he had been accustomed to write. He was much disposed to view the hit he had made as an accident, and to doubt if it would lead to anything further in the line of authorship. But he was mistaken. The purveyors of literature were after him at once. That was in 1870. Since then his published works have grown to a considerable list.