Cummings served as editor of the _Weekly Tribune_ and as a political writer for the daily. This is the way he came to quit the _Tribune_: John Russell Young, the third managing editor of the _Tribune_, got the habit of issuing numbered orders. Two of these orders reached Cummings’s desk, as follows: Order No. 756--There is too much profanity in this office. Order No. 757--Hereafter the political reporter must have his copy in at 10.30 P.M. Cummings turned to his desk and wrote: Order No. 1234567--Everybody knows ---- well that I get most of the political news out of the Albany _Journal_, and everybody knows ---- ---- well that the _Journal_ doesn’t get here until eleven o’clock at night, and anybody who knows anything knows ---- ---- well that asking me to get my stuff up at half past ten is like asking a man to sit on a window-sill and dance on the roof at the same time. CUMMINGS. The result of this multiplicity of numbered orders was that shortly afterward Cummings presented himself to the editor of the _Sun_. “Why are you leaving the _Tribune_?” asked Mr. Dana. “They say,” replied Amos, “that I swear too much.” “Just the man for me!” replied Dana, according to the version which Cummings used to tell. At any rate, Amos went on the _Sun_ as managing editor, and he continued to swear. The compositors now in the _Sun_ office who remember him at all remember him largely for that. The union once set apart a day for contributions to the printers’-home fund, and each compositor was to contribute the fruits of a thousand ems of composition. Cummings, who was proud of being a union printer, left his managing-editor’s desk and went to the composing-room. “Ah, Mr. Cummings,” said Abe Masters, the foreman, “I’ll give you some of your own copy to set.” “To hell with my own copy!” said Cummings, who knew his handwriting faults. “Give me some reprint.” Green reporters got a taste of the Cummings profanity. One of them put a French phrase in a story. Cummings asked him what it meant, and the youth told him. “Then why the hell didn’t you write it that way?” yelled Cummings. “This paper is for people who read English!” In those days murderers were executed in the old Tombs prison in Centre Street. Cummings, who was full of enterprise, sought a way to get quickly the fall of the drop. The telephone had not been perfected, but there was a shot-tower north of the _Sun’s_ office and east of the Tombs. Cummings sent one man to the Tombs, with instructions to wave a flag upon the instant of the execution. Another man, stationed at the top of the shot-tower, had another flag, with which he was to make a sign to Cummings on the roof of the Sun Building, as soon as he saw the flag move at the prison.