Horatio Alger, Jr., wrote several of his best tales for Mr. Beach, who printed them serially in the _Sun_ and the _Weekly Sun_. To the New York youth of 1859, who dreamed not that in three years he would be clay on the slope at Fredericksburg, it was the middle of a perfect day to pick up the _Sun_, read a thrilling news story about Blondin cooking an omelet while crossing the Niagara gorge on a tight rope, and then, turning to the last page, to plunge into “The Discarded Son; or, the Cousin’s Plot,” by the author of “The Secret Drawer,” “The Cooper’s Ward,” “The Gipsy Nurse,” and “Madeline the Temptress”--for all these were written expressly for the _Sun_ by young Mr. Alger. He was only twenty-five then, with the years ahead when, a Unitarian minister, he should see fiction material in the New York street-boy and write the epics of _Ragged Dick_ and _Tattered Tom_. What did the women readers of the _Sun_ care about the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania or the wonderful trotting campaign of Flora Temple, when they could devour daily two columns of “Jessie Graham; or, Love and Pride”? The _Sun_ might condense A. T. Stewart’s purchase of two city blocks into a paragraph, but there must be no short measure of “Gerald Vane’s Lost One,” by Walter Savage North. When the religious folk held the reins of the _Sun_ they tried to compromise by printing “Great Expectations” as a serial, but the wise Mr. Beach, on getting the paper back, quickly flung to his hungry readers “Hunted Down,” by Ann S. Stephens. Later in the war he catered to the martial spirit with “Running the Blockade,” by Captain Wheeler, United States army. One column of foreign news, one of city paragraphs, one of editorial articles, one of jokes and miscellany, one of fiction, and nineteen of advertising--that was about the make-up of Beach’s _Sun_ before the Civil War; that was the prescription which enabled the _Sun_ to sell nearly sixty thousand copies in a city of eight hundred thousand people. It was a fairly well condensed paper. In February, 1857, when it printed one day two and a half columns about the mysterious murder of Dr. Harvey Burdell, the rich dentist of Bond Street, it broke its record for length in a police story. It was in Moses S. Beach’s time that the Atlantic cable, second only to the telegraph proper as an aid to newspapers, was laid. On August 6, 1858, when Cyrus W. Field telegraphed to the Associated Press from Newfoundland that the ends of the cables had reached both shores of the sea, the _Sun_ said that it was “the greatest triumph of the age.” Eleven days later the _Sun_ contained this article: