It was left to the _Commercial_ to discover that Rome was a city set on the hills, and that she ought to have an advertising torch in her hands. The _Commercial_, however, was only an experiment. It was run, as Mr. Grady told me long afterwards, as an amateur casual. He had money to spend on it, and he gave it a long string to go on. Occasionally he would fill it up with his bright fancies, and then he would neglect it for days at a time, and it would then be edited by the foreman. It was about this time that I met Mr. Grady. We had had some correspondence. He was appreciative, and whatever struck his fancy he had a quick response for. Some foolish paragraph of mine had appealed to his sense of humor, and he pursued the matter with a sympathetic letter that made a lasting impression. The result of that letter was that I went to Rome, pulled him from his flying ponies, and had a most enjoyable visit. From Rome we went to Lookout Mountain, and it is needless to say that he was the life of the party. He was its body, its spirit, and its essence. We found, in our journey, a dissipated person who could play on the zither. Just how important that person became, those who remember Mr. Grady’s pranks can imagine. The man with the zither took the shape of a minstrel, and in that guise he went with us, always prepared to make music, which he had often to do in response to Mr. Grady’s demands. Rome, however, soon ceased to be large enough for the young editor. Atlanta seemed to offer the widest field, and he came here, and entered into partnership with Colonel Robert A. Alston and Alex St. Clair-Abrams. It was a queer partnership, but there was much that was congenial about it. Colonel Alston was a typical South Carolinian, and Abrams was a Creole. It would be difficult to get together three more impulsive and enterprising partners. Little attention was paid to the business office. The principal idea was to print the best newspaper in the South, and for a time this scheme was carried out in a magnificent way that could not last. Mr. Grady never bothered himself about the finances, and the other editors were not familiar with the details of business. The paper they published attracted more attention from newspaper men than it did from the public, and it was finally compelled to suspend. Its good will—and it had more good will than capital—was sold to the _Constitution_, which had been managed in a more conservative style. It is an interesting fact, however, that Mr. Grady’s experiments in the _Herald_, which were failures, were successful when tried on the _Constitution_, whose staff he joined when Captain Evan P. Howell secured a controlling interest. And yet Mr. Grady’s development as a newspaper man was not as rapid as might be supposed. He was employed by the _Constitution_ as a reporter, and his work was intermittent.