With these economies Beach was able to keep the price at one cent until August 1, 1864, when the _Sun_ slyly said: We shall require the one cent for the _Sun_ to be paid in gold, or we will receive as an equivalent two cents in currency. Apologies or explanations are needless. An inflated currency has raised the price of white paper nearly threefold. Of course nobody had one cent in gold, so the _Sun_ readers grinned and paid two cents in copper. From that day on the price of the _Sun_ was two cents until July 1, 1916, when Frank A. Munsey bought the _Sun_, combined his one-cent newspaper, the New York _Press_, with it, and reduced the price to one cent. On January 26, 1918, by reason of heavy expenses incidental to the war, the _Sun_, with all the other large papers of New York, increased its price to two cents a copy. In its eighty-five years the _Sun_ has been a penny paper thirty-two years, a two-cent paper fifty-three years. The _Sun_ was constantly profitable in the decade before the Civil War. The average annual profits from 1850 to 1860 were $22,770. The high-water mark in that period was reached in 1853, when the advertising receipts were $89,964 and the net profits $42,906. Its circulation in September, 1860, was fifty-nine thousand copies daily, of which forty-five thousand were sold on the island of Manhattan. One of the secrets of the _Sun’s_ popularity in the years when it had no such news guidance as Bennett gave to the _Herald_, no such spirited editorials as Greeley put into the _Tribune_, no such political prestige as Raymond brought to the _Times_, was Moses S. Beach’s belief that his public wanted light fiction. The appetite created by Scott and increased by Dickens was keen in America. True, the penny _Sun’s_ literary standards were not of Himalayan height. Hawthorne was too spiritual for its readers, Poe too brief. They wanted wads of adventure and dialogue, dour squires, swooning ladies, hellish villains, handsome heroes, and comic character folk. The young mechanic had to have something he could understand without knitting his brows. For him, “The Grocer’s Apprentice; a Tale of the Great Plague,” and “Dick Egan; or, the San Francisco Bandits,” written for the _Sun_ by H. Warren Trowbridge. In the days before the Civil War, wives snatched the _Sun_ from husbands to read “Maggie Miller; or, Old Hagar’s Secret,” “written expressly for the _Sun_” by Mary J. Holmes, already famous through “Lena Rivers” and “Dora Deane.” Ephemeral? They are still reading “Lena Rivers” in North Crossing, Nebraska.