On another assignment, a murder mystery, the relatives of the victim, who were ignorant and superstitious people, suspected Ralph of being the murderer. When he came into their house to see the body, they demanded that he should touch it, their belief being that the body would turn over, or the wounds reopen, if touched by the murderer. There was an implied threat of death for the reporter if he refused, but Ralph walked out without complying. Ralph was a believer in the sixth sense of journalists, that inexplicable gift by which a man, and particularly a newspaperman, comes to a clairvoyant knowledge that something is about to happen--in other words, an exalted hunch. John B. Bogart, city editor in Ralph’s _Sun_ days, had this sense, and he called it a “current of news.” He thus described its workings to Ralph: One day I was walking up Broadway when suddenly a current of news came up from a cellar and enveloped me. I felt the difference in the temperature of the air. I tingled with the electricity or magnetism in the current. It seemed to stop me, to turn me around, and to force me to descend some stairs which reached up to the street by my side. I ran down the steps, and as I did so a pistol-shot sounded in my ears. One man had shot another, and I found myself at the scene upon the instant. While acting as the legislative correspondent of the _Sun_ at Albany, Ralph was in the habit of walking to one of the local parks to enjoy the view across a valley southwest of the city. One day, while gazing across the valley, he was seized with a desire to go to the mountains in the distance beyond it. The impulse remained with him for two days, and then, on the third day, he read of a news happening that had occurred in the mountains on the very day when the current of news had thrilled him. Ralph reported the Dreyfus court-martial at Rennes, in France. One morning he could not sleep after five o’clock. As he was on his way to court he said to George W. Steevens, of the London _Daily Mail_, who was walking with him: “Wait a moment while I go into the telegraph office and wire my paper that I expect exciting news to-day.” At that hour there was no apparent reason to expect any news out of the ordinary, but it was only a few hours later that Maître Labori, Dreyfus’s counsel, was shot down on his way to court. Young newspapermen who are fortunate enough to be possessed of--or by--the sixth sense must remember, however, that it cannot be relied upon to sound the alarm on every occasion. Mr. Bogart, who felt that he had a friend in the current of news, kept close track of the assignment-book. As a city editor he was unsurpassed for his diligence in following up news stories. One day he assigned Brainerd G. Smith, afterward professor of journalism at Cornell, to report the first reception given by Judge Hilton after the death of the judge’s partner, A. T. Stewart.