The men of 1893 probably agreed that there was no staff like the staff of 1868, just as the men of 1942 may gaze with proud regret at the staff list of 1917. Distance, like pay-day, lends enchantment; and newspaper history is a little more hazy than most other kinds of history, because the men who write what happens to other people have no time to set down what happens to themselves. The anonymity of the _Sun_ reporter has been almost complete. If Julian Ralph had never gone into the field of books and magazines, he would have been as little known to the general public as the _Sun’s_ best reporter is to-day; but newspapermen would not have undervalued him. There is better quality in the things he wrote hastily and anonymously for the _Sun_ than in some of the eight or nine published volumes that bear his name, and the reason for this is that he was primarily a newspaperman. [Illustration: ARTHUR BRISBANE ] He entered the game at fifteen, as an apprentice in the office of the Red Bank (New Jersey) _Standard_. At seventeen he was a city editor and a writer of humour. At eighteen he had founded the Red Bank _Leader_--a failure. At nineteen he was one of the editors of the Webster (Massachusetts) _Times_, and at twenty he was a reporter on the New York _Graphic_. At twenty-two he was on the _Sun_, where he remained from 1875 to 1893. Ralph was a news man who lacked none of the large reportorial qualities. He enjoyed seeing new places and new people. He liked to hunt news--an instinct missing in some good writers who fail to be great reporters. He liked to write--a taste found too seldom among men who write well, and too frequently among the graphomaniacs who fancy that everything is worth writing, and that perfection lies in an infinite number of words. Some one said of Ralph that he “could write five thousand words about a cobblestone.” If he had done that, it would have been an interesting cobblestone. He had a passion for detail, but it was not the lifeless and wearisome detail of the realistic novelist. When he wrote half a column about a horse eating a woman’s hat, the reader became well acquainted with the horse, the woman, and the crowd that had looked on. Ralph was untiring in mind, legs, and fingers. He liked the big one-man news story, such as an inauguration or a parade, or the general introduction of a national convention. His quiet, easy style, his ability to cover an event of many hours and much territory, were shown to good advantage in his description of the funeral of General Grant in August, 1885. He wrote it all--a full front page of small type--in about seven hours, and with a pencil. It began: