Mr. Dana has always been the master, and not the slave, of the immediate task. The external features of his journalism are simplicity, directness, common sense, and the entire absence of affectation. He would no more think of living up to Mr. Kinglake’s ideal of a great, mysterious, and thought-burdened editor, than of putting on a conical hat and a black robe spangled with suns, moons, and stars, when about to receive a visitor to his editorial office in Nassau Street. That office in Nassau Street, of which every reader of the _Sun_, and surely every newspaperman in America, formed his own mental picture! To some imaginations it probably was a bare room, with a desk for the editor and, close by, the famous cat. To other imaginations, whose owners were familiar with Mr. Dana’s love for the beautiful, the office may have been a studio unmarred by the presence of a single unbeautiful object. Both visions were incorrect. [Illustration: (_Drawn from Life by Corwin Knapp Linson_) MR. DANA IN HIS OFFICE ] Surroundings were nothing to Dana. To him an office was a place to work, to convert ideas into readable form. What would works of art be in such a place to a man who took more interest in the crowds that went to and fro on Park Row beneath his window? Let the room itself be described by Mr. Mitchell, who set down this picture of it after he had spent hours in it with Mr. Dana almost daily for twenty years: In the middle of the small room a desk-table of black walnut of the Fulton Street style and the period of the first administration of Grant; a shabby little round table at the window, where Mr. Dana sits when the day is dark; one leather-covered chair, which does duty at either post, and two wooden chairs, both rickety, for visitors on errands of business or ceremony; on the desk a revolving case with a few dozen books of reference; an ink-pot and pen, not much used except in correcting manuscript and proofs, for Mr. Dana talks off to a stenographer his editorial articles and his correspondence, sometimes spending on the revision of the former twice as much time as was required for the dictation; a window-seat filled with exchanges, marked here and there in blue pencil for the editor’s eyes; a big pair of shears, and two or three extra pairs of spectacles in cache against an emergency--these few items constitute what is practically the whole objective equipment of the editor of the _Sun_. The shears are probably the newest article of furniture in the list. They replaced, three or four years ago, another pair of unknown antiquity, besought and obtained by Eugene Field, and now occupying, alongside of Mr. Gladstone’s ax, the place of honor in that poet’s celebrated collection of edged instruments.