The second managing editor of the _Sun_ was that great newspaperman Amos Jay Cummings. He was born to newspaper work if any man ever was. His father, who was a Congregational minister--a fact which could not be surmised by listening to Amos in one of his explosive moods--was the editor of the _Christian Palladium and Messenger_. This staid publication was printed on the first floor of the Cummings home at Irvington, New Jersey. Entrance to the composing-room was forbidden the son, but with tears and tobacco he bribed the printer, one Sylvester Bailey, who set up the Rev. Mr. Cummings’s articles, to let him in through a window. Cummings and Bailey later set type together on the _Tribune_. They fought in the same regiment in the Civil War. They worked together on the _Evening Sun_, and they are buried in the same cemetery at Irvington. The trade once learned, young Amos left home and wandered from State to State, making a living at the case. In 1856, when he was only fourteen, he was attracted by the glamour that surrounded William Walker, the famous filibuster, and joined the forces of that daring young adventurer, who then had control of Nicaragua. The boy was one of a strange horde of soldiers of fortune, which included British soldiers who had been at Sebastopol, Italians who had followed Garibaldi, and Hungarians in whom Kossuth had aroused the martial flame. Like many of the others in Walker’s army, Cummings believed that the Tennessean was a second Napoleon, with Central America, perhaps South America, for his empire. But when this Napoleon came to his Elba by his surrender to Commander Davis of the United States navy, in the spring of 1857, Cummings decided that there was no marshal’s baton in his own ragged knapsack and went back to be a wandering printer. Cummings was setting type in the _Tribune_ office when the Civil War began. He hurried out and enlisted as a private in the Twenty-Sixth New Jersey Volunteer Infantry. He fought at Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Fredericksburg. At Marye’s Hill, in the battle of Fredericksburg, his regiment was supporting a battery against a Confederate charge. Their lines were broken and they fell back from the guns. Cummings took the regimental flag from the hands of the colour-sergeant and ran alone, under the enemy’s fire, back to the guns. The Jerseymen rallied, the guns were recovered, and Cummings got the Medal of Honor from Congress. He left the service as sergeant-major of the regiment and presently appeared in Greeley’s office, a seedy figure infolded in an army overcoat. “Mr. Greeley,” said Amos, “I’ve just got to have work.” “Oh, indeed!” creaked Horace. “And why have you got to have work?” Cummings said nothing, but turned his back on the great editor, lifted his coat-tails and showed the sad, if not shocking, state of his breeches. He got work. In 1863, when the _Tribune_ office was threatened by the rioters, Amos helped to barricade the composing-room and save it from the mob.