Persons in search of alms would enter Mr. Dana’s room without ceremony. If they were Sisters of Charity, as often was the case, Mr. Dana would walk up and down, telling them of his visit with the Pope, and would finish by giving them one of the silver dollars of which his pocket seemed to have an endless supply. Almost every day, when he despatched a boy to a nearby restaurant for his sandwich and bottle of milk, he would give him a five-dollar bill and instruct him to bring back the change all in silver. He liked to jingle the coins in his pocket and to have them ready for alms-giving. Dana was never fussy, never overbearing with his men. He bore patiently with the occasional sinner, and tried to put the best face on a mistake. The Dana patience extended also to outsiders. On one occasion William M. Laffan, then the dramatic critic and later the owner of the _Sun_, wrote a severe criticism of a performance by Miss Ada Rehan. Augustin Daly hurried to Mr. Dana’s office the next afternoon. “Mr. Dana,” he said, “I have called to try to convince you that you should discharge your dramatic editor. He has--” “I see,” said Dana, smiling. “Well, Mr. Daly, I will speak to Mr. Laffan about the matter, and if he thinks that he really deserves to be discharged, I will most certainly do it!” Thirty or forty years ago the belief was not uncommon, among those ignorant of editorial methods and the limitations of human powers, that Mr. Dana wrote every word that appeared on the editorial page of the _Sun_. It is likely that this flattering myth came to his ears and caused him more than one chuckle. Dana wrote pieces for the _Sun_, many of them, but he never essayed the superhuman task of filling the whole page with his own self. Nobody knew better than he what a bore a man becomes who flows opinion constantly, whether by voice or by pen. For Dana, not the eternal verities in allopathic doses, but the entertaining varieties, carefully administered. He might be immensely interested in the destruction of the Whisky Ring, and in writing about that infamy articles which would scorch the ears of Washington; but he knew that not every man, woman, and child who read the _Sun_ was furious about the Whisky Ring or cared to read columns of opinion about it every day. They must have pabulum in the form of an article about the princely earnings of Charles Dickens, or the identification of Mount Sinai, or the mysterious murder of a French count.