The _Sun_ of that day had women reporters; indeed, it had the first real woman reporter in American journalism, Mrs. Emily Verdery Battey. She worked on fashion stories, women’s-rights stories, and general-news stories. She was one of the Georgia Verderys, and she went on the _Sun_ shortly after Mr. Dana took hold. Her brother, George Verdery, was also a _Sun_ reporter. Another _Sun_ woman of that time was Miss Anna Ballard, who wrote, among other things, the news stories that bobbed up in the surrogates’ court. The dramatic criticisms of the _Sun_, in the first three or four years of the seventies, were written by two young lawyers recently graduated from the law school of New York University, Willard Bartlett and Elihu Root. Bartlett was a year the younger, but he ranked Root as a critic because of his acquaintance--through his father, W. O. Bartlett--with newspaper ways. If Lester Wallack was putting on “Ours,” that would be Mr. Bartlett’s assignment, while Mr. Root went to report the advance of art at Woods’s Museum, where was the Lydia Thompson troupe. If it befell that on the same evening Edwin Booth produced “Hamlet” in a new setting and George L. Fox appeared in a more glorious than ever “Humpty Dumpty,” Critic Bartlett would see Booth; Assistant Critic Root, Fox. In time these young journalists passed on to be actors in that more complex and perhaps equally interesting drama, the law, which for fourteen years they practised together. Mr. Bartlett figured as one of Mr. Dana’s counsel in several of the _Sun’s_ legal cases. After thirty years on the bench, retiring from the chief judgeship of the Court of Appeals of the State of New York through the age statute in 1916, Judge Bartlett is still actively interested in the _Sun_, and many of its articles on legal and literary topics are contributed by him. As for Mr. Root, his friendship with the _Sun_ has been unbroken for almost fifty years, and he has made more news for it than most men. Under such circumstances even the most jealous newspaper is willing to forgive the desertion of an assistant dramatic critic. It was Willard Bartlett, incidentally, who was the inventor of the _Sun’s_ celebrated office cat. One night in the eighties the copy of a message from President Cleveland to Congress came to the desk of the telegraph editor. It was a warm evening, and the window near the telegraph desk was open. The message fluttered out and was lost in Nassau Street. The _Sun_ had nothing about it the next morning, and in the afternoon, when Mr. Bartlett called on Mr. Dana, the matter of the lost message was under discussion. The editor remarked that it was a matter difficult to explain to the readers. “Oh, say that the office cat ate it up,” suggested Bartlett.