The invariable law of the newspaper is to be interesting. Suppose you tell all the truths of science in a way that bores the reader; what is the good? The truths don’t stay in the mind, and nobody thinks any the better of you because you have told the truth tediously. The reporter must give his story in such a way that you know he feels its qualities and events and is interested in them. Dana was catholic not only in his taste for news, but in his idea of the manner of writing it. Nothing gave him more uneasiness than to find that a _Sun_ man was drifting into a stereotyped way of handling a news story or writing an editorial article. Even as he advised young men to read everything from Shakespeare and Milton down, he repeatedly warned them against the imitation, unconscious or otherwise, of another’s style: Do not take any model. Every man has his own natural style, and the thing to do is to develop it into simplicity and clearness. Do not, for instance, labor after such a style as Matthew Arnold’s--one of the most beautiful styles that has ever been seen in any literature. It is no use to try to get another man’s style or to imitate the wit or the mannerisms of another writer. The late Mr. Carlyle, for example, did, in my judgment, a considerable mischief in his day, because he led everybody to write after the style of his “French Revolution,” and it became pretty tedious. If a writer could not keep on without aping the literary fashion of another, then he was not for the _Sun_. Dana wanted good English always, but a constant spice of variety in the treatment of a subject, and in the style itself; therefore he chose a variety of men. If he believed that the best report of a ship-launching could be written by a longshoreman, he would have hired the hard-handed toiler and assigned him to the job. He wanted men who would look at the world with open eyes and find the new things that were going on. Dana knew that they were going on. His vision had not been narrowed by too close application to newspaper offices where editors and managing editors had handled the stock stories year in and year out in the same wearisome way. To Dana life was not a mere procession of elections, legislatures, theatrical performances, murders, and lectures. Life was everything--a new kind of apple, a crying child on the curb, a policeman’s epigram, the exact weight of a candidate for President, the latest style in whiskers, the origin of a new slang expression, the idiosyncrasies of the City Hall clock, a strange four-master in the harbour, the head-dresses of Syrian girls, a new president or a new football coach at Yale, a vendetta in Mulberry Bend--everything was fish to the great net of Dana’s mind.