It must be remembered that at that time lotteries were not under a cloud. There were in New York forty-five lottery offices, licensed at two hundred and fifty dollars apiece annually, and the proceeds were divided between the public schools and a home for deaf-mutes. That was the last year of legalized lotteries. After they disappeared Greeley started the _New Yorker_, the best literary weekly of its time. It was not until April, 1841, that he founded the _Tribune_. Doubtless there were many young New Yorkers of that period who would have made bang-up reporters, but apparently, until Day’s time, with few exceptions they did not work on morning newspapers. One exception was James Gordon Bennett, whose work for Webb on the _Courier and Enquirer_ helped to make it the leading American paper. Nathaniel P. Willis and George P. Morris would probably have been good reporters, for they knew New York and had excellent styles, but they insisted on being poets. With Morris it was not a hollow vocation, for the author of “Woodman, Spare That Tree,” could always get fifty dollars for a song. He and Willis ran the _Mirror_ and later the _New Mirror_, and wrote verse and other fanciful stuff by the bushel. Philip Hone would have been the best reporter in New York, as his diary reveals, but he was of the aristocracy, and he seems to have scorned newspapermen, particularly Webb and Bennett. But somehow, by that chance which seemed to smile on the _Sun_, Ben Day got clever reporters. He wanted one to do the police-court work, for he saw, from the first day of the paper, that that was the kind of stuff that his readers devoured. To them the details of a beating administered by James Hawkins to his wife were of more import than Jackson’s assaults on the United States Bank. When George W. Wisner, a young printer who was out of work, applied to the _Sun_ for a job, Day told him that he would give him four dollars a week if he would get up early every day and attend the police-court, which held its sessions from 4 A.M. on. The people of the city were quite as human then as they are to-day. Unregenerate mortals got drunk and fought in the streets. Others stole shoes. The worst of all beat their wives. Wisner was to be the Balzac of the daybreak court in a year when Balzac himself was writing his “Droll Stories.” The second issue of the _Sun_ continued the typographical error of the day before. The year in the date-line of the second page was “1832.” The big news in this paper was under date of Plymouth, England, August 1, and it told of the capture of Lisbon by Admiral Napier on the 25th of July. Day--or perhaps it was Wisner--wrote an editorial article about it: