Many traditions long survived in the office of Nordhoff’s energy, courage, shrewdness, and impassivity in moments of excitement. He was a man of the world, and his sense for news was amazing. Expected to contribute to the editorial page as well as manage the news staff, he would seat himself at his desk and write with unresting hand, meanwhile puffing a black cigar so furiously that he could hardly see his sheet through the smoke. A bluff seamanlike quality was always distinguishable about him; he walked with a sailor’s roll, and used nautical terms with unconscious frequency. His executive ability, geniality, fearlessness, and intense hatred of anything equivocal or underhanded, made the staff love him. Mr. J. Ranken Towse, who knew him after the war, says that “he had a comprehensive grasp of essential knowledge, a great store of common sense, a rare faculty of penetrating insight, and a huge scorn for prevarication or double-dealing. A mistake due to ignorance or carelessness he could and often did overlook, but anything in the nature of a shuffling excuse roused him to flaming ire. He was impetuous and irascible, but naturally generous and tender-hearted.” During the Draft Riots Nordhoff connected a hose with the steam-boiler in the basement and gave public notice that any assailant would meet a scalding reception. He had not only the _Evening Post_ property to protect, but a score of wounded soldiers in a temporary hospital fitted up on an upper floor. The strain under which he lived in the war days was intense, and he used to spend the summer nights on a small sailboat which he kept on the Brooklyn waterfront, for he could sleep more soundly drifting about the bay than on shore. Yet he managed to find time to contribute to the newspaper’s atmosphere of literary sociability. Paul Du Chaillu had become his friend when, as a worker at Harper’s, he helped put some of Du Chaillu’s books into good English, and a story survives of how Du Chaillu and Nordhoff once took possession of the restaurant stove across the street from the _Evening Post_, and taught the cook to broil bananas--the first bananas ever eaten cooked in the city. Nordhoff’s impress was visible everywhere in the paper of those years, and its marked prosperity was in large degree traceable to his energy. The local reporting was better than ever before, and we are tempted to discern his own hand in the frequent human-interest paragraphs, of which one may be given as a specimen: AN INCIDENT IN THE CARS In a car on a railroad which runs into New York, a few mornings ago, a scene occurred which will not soon be forgotten by the witnesses of it. A person dressed as a gentleman, speaking to a friend across the car, said: “Well, I hope the war may last six months longer. In the last six months I’ve made a hundred thousand dollars--six months more and I shall have enough.”