Of the nine men who have been owners of the _Sun_, seven were of down-east Yankee stock, and six of the seven were born in New England. Of the editors-in-chief of the _Sun_--except in that brief period of the lease by the religious coterie--all have been New Englanders but one, and he was the son of a New Englander. Dana was born in Hinsdale, New Hampshire, on August 8, 1819. His father was Anderson Dana, sixth in descent from Richard Dana, the colonial settler; and his mother, Ann Denison, came of straight Yankee stock. The father failed in business at Hinsdale when Charles was a child, and the family moved to Gaines, a village in western New York, where Anderson Dana became a farmer. Here the mother died, leaving four children--Charles Anderson, aged nine; Junius, seven; Maria, three, and David, an infant. The widower went to the home of Mrs. Dana’s parents near Guildhall, Vermont, and there the children were divided among relatives. Charles was sent to live with his uncle, David Denison, on a farm in the Connecticut River Valley. There was a good teacher at the school near by, and at the age of ten Charles was considered as proficient in his English studies as many boys of fifteen. When he was twelve he had added some Latin to the three R’s. In the judgment of that day he was fit to go to work. His uncle, William Dana, was part owner of the general store of Staats & Dana, in Buffalo, New York, whither the boy was sent by stage-coach. He made himself handy in the store and lived at his uncle’s house. Buffalo, a distributing place for freight sent West on the Erie Canal, had a population of only fifteen thousand in 1831. Many of Staats & Dana’s customers were Indians, and young Charles added to the store’s efficiency by learning the Seneca language. At night he continued his pursuit of Latin, tackled Greek, read what volumes of Tom Paine he could buy at a book-shop next door, and followed the career, military and political, of the strenuous Andrew Jackson. When he had a day off he went fishing in the Niagara River or visited the Indian reservation. He was a normal, healthy lad, even if he knew more Latin than he should. When war threatened with Great Britain over the Caroline affair, Dana joined the City Guard and had a brief ambition to be a soldier. He was of slender build, but strong. He belonged to the Coffee Club, a literary organization, and he made a talk to it on early English poetry. “The best days of my life,” he called this period. Staats & Dana failed in the panic of 1837, and Charles, then eighteen, and the possessor of two hundred dollars saved from his wages, decided to go to Harvard. He left Buffalo in June, 1839, although his father did not like the idea of letting him go to Harvard. “I know it ranks high as a literary institution, but the influence it exerts in a religious way is most horrible--even worse than Universalism.”