One evening in that period the other desk men in the news department of the _Sun_ observed that Amos Stillman was extraordinarily busy and more than usually silent. He scribbled away, revising despatches and writing subheads, and it was after twelve o’clock when he got up, stretched, and uttered one sentence: “Quite a fire in Chicago!” That was the October evening in 1871 when Mrs. O’Leary’s cow started the blaze that consumed seventeen thousand buildings. To Deacon Stillman it was just a busy night. Deacon Stillman was born only eighteen months after the _Sun_--Ben Day’s _Sun_; but even as this is being written he is strolling up and down a corridor in the _Sun_ office, waiting for another old-timer, some mere lad of sixty, to come out and have dinner with him. Under Cummings was developed a young man who turned out to be one of the great city editors of New York--John B. Bogart, of whom Arthur Brisbane wrote that he was the best teacher of journalism that America had produced. He was in most respects the opposite of Cummings. He had all of Cummings’s love for the business, but not his tremendous rush. Cummings was an explosion, Bogart a steady flame. Cummings roared, Bogart was gentle. Like Cummings and Stillman, Bogart was a Union veteran. In 1861, when he was only sixteen years old, he left the New Haven store where he was a clerk and enlisted in the Seventh Connecticut Volunteers. After serving three years in the army, he returned home to become a bookkeeper in a dry-goods store. He went on the _Sun_ February 21, 1871, as a general reporter. On March 17, 1873--his twenty-eighth birthday--he was made city editor, the former city editor, William Young, having been promoted to the managing editor’s desk to take the place of Cummings, whose health was poor. John Bogart remained at the city desk for seventeen years of tireless work. He was a master of journalistic detail, a patient follower-up of the stories which, like periscopes, appear and reappear on the sea of events. “He was a whole school of journalism in himself,” Brisbane wrote of Bogart years afterward. “He could tell the young men where to go for their news, what questions to ask, what was and what was not worth while. Above all, he could give enthusiasm to his men. He worked by encouraging, not by harsh criticism.” Bogart always asked a young reporter whether he had read the _Sun_ that morning. If one confessed that he had read only part of it, Bogart would invite him to sit down, and would say: “Mr. Jones, it is one of the salutary customs of this paper that every reporter shall read everything in it before appearing for duty. Don’t even skip the advertisements, because there are stories concealed in many of them. The _Sun_ is good breakfast-food.” The custom of Bogart’s time is the custom still, but a reporter has to go harder at his reading than he did in the days of the four-page _Sun_.