Fires--A Child Burnt to Death (The week-end conflagrations totalled eleven, a modest list. At one in Leroy Street nine houses had been burnt; at one in Thirteenth Street a child and six horses had been killed). City Statistics (The last year saw 1,823 new buildings erected; the city had 327 licensed omnibuses, 3,780 taverns and saloons, 168 junkshops, and 681 charcoal peddlers). And so the column continued through police news, theater puffs, and notices of academy commencements, until it ended just above an advertisement of Sands’s Sarsaparilla and the Balsam of Wild Cherry, glowingly recommended by testimonials. But the chief improvement in the news was wrought by special correspondence, which early in the forties attained a surprising extent and finish. By various means, including advertising for correspondents, Bryant built up a staff of contributors that covered every part of the nation. In 1841–2 each week during the sessions of Congress brought letters from two men, “Z” and “Very,” while during the legislative session there were two Albany correspondents, “L” and “Publius.” Every important State capital north of Richmond had its contributor. In the first week of 1842, for example, appeared letters from Springfield, Ill., Providence, R. I., and Detroit, Mich. A Paris correspondent wrote regularly over the initials “A. V.,” and a London correspondent signed much more frequent articles “O. P. Q.” This London correspondence ran to great length. Into one typical article, printed on March 14, 1842, “O. P. Q.” crowded an account of the royal christening, at which the future Edward VII “was got back to the Castle without squalling”; the Dublin elections; Macready’s experiment at Drury Lane Theater, where for the first time the pit seats had been “provided with backs, and, together with the boxes, numbered, and a ticket given to the occupant, who thus keeps his seat throughout the evening”; of Adelaide Kemble’s singing at Covent Garden; of Douglas Jerrold’s new comedy, “Prisoners of War”; and of the new books, including Mrs. Trollope’s “Blue Belles of England”; the whole concluding with some gossip about a ruler in whom Americans were more interested than in President Tyler: It is said that the Queen still continues staunch Whig; that she is civil, but laconic, to the Tories; and that pleasant old Lord Melbourne’s easy chair, in which he used to take his after-dinner nap when he dined at the palace, is still kept for his use alone, being wheeled out of the closet when he dines there, and wheeled back when he takes his departure.