The reporter at the Tombs arranged with a keeper to notify him just before the execution, but the keeper was sent on an errand, and presently Cummings, standing nervously on the roof of the Sun Building, heard the newsboys crying the extras of a rival sheet. The plan had fallen through. No blanks could adequately represent the Cummings temper upon that occasion. Cummings was probably the best all-round news man of his day. He had the executive ability and the knowledge of men that make a good managing editor. He knew what Dana knew--that the newspapers had yet to touch public sympathy and imagination in the news columns as well as in editorial articles; and he knew how to do it, how to teach men to do it, how to cram the moving picture of a living city into the four pages of the _Sun_. He advised desk men, complimented or corrected reporters, edited local articles, and, when a story appealed to him strongly, he went out and got it and wrote it himself. In such brief biographies of Cummings as have been printed you will find that he is best remembered in the outer world as a managing editor, or as the editor of the _Evening Sun_, or as a Representative in Congress fighting for the rights of Civil War veterans, printers’ unions, and letter-carriers; but among the oldest generation of newspapermen he is revered as a great reporter. He was the first real human-interest reporter. He knew the news value of the steer loose in the streets, the lost child in the police station, the Italian murder that was really a case of vendetta. The _Sun_ men of his time followed his lead, and a few of them, like Julian Ralph, outdid him, but he was the pioneer; and a thousand _Sun_ men since then have kept, or tried to keep, on the Cummings trail. It was Cummings who sent men to cover the police stations at night and made it possible for the _Sun_ to beat the news association on the trivial items which were the delight of the reader, and which helped, among other things, to shoot the paper’s daily circulation to one hundred thousand in the third year of the Dana ownership. The years when Cummings was managing editor of the _Sun_ were years stuffed with news. Even a newspaperman without imagination would have found plenty of happenings at hand. The Franco-Prussian War, the gold conspiracy that ended in Black Friday (September 24, 1869), the Orange riot (July 12, 1871), the great Chicago fire, the killing of Fisk by Stokes, Tweedism--what more could a newspaperman wish in so brief a period? And, of course, always there were murders. There were so many mysterious murders in the _Sun_ that a suspicious person might have harboured the thought that Cummings went out after his day’s work was done and committed them for art’s sake.