Spears was a hard worker. They said of him in the _Sun_ office that he never went out on an assignment without bringing in the material for a special article for the Sunday paper. He wrote several books, including “The Gold Diggings of Cape Horn,” “The Port of Missing Ships,” “The History of Our Navy,” “The Story of the American Merchant Marine,” “The Story of the New England Whalers,” and “The History of the American Slave Trade.” He now lives in retirement near Little Falls, New York. His son, Raymond S. Spears, the fiction-writer, was a _Sun_ reporter from 1896 to 1900. Park Row knows Erasmus D. Beach chiefly through the book-reviews he wrote for the _Sun_ during many years, but he was a first-class reporter, too. The _Sun_ liked specialists, but no man could expect to stick to his specialty. When Gustav Kobbé went on the _Sun_ in March, 1880, it was for the general purpose of assisting William M. Laffan in dramatic criticism and Francis C. Bowman in musical criticism; but his first assignment was to go to Bellevue Hospital and investigate the reported mistreatment of smallpox patients--a job which he accepted like the good soldier that every good _Sun_ man is. Mr. Beach was a clever all-round writer and reporter, with a leaning toward the purely literary side of the business, and he had no special fondness for sports; but the _Sun_ sent him, with Christopher J. Fitzgerald and David Graham Phillips, to report the Yale-Princeton football-game at Eastern Park, Brooklyn, on Thanksgiving Day, 1890--that glorious day for Yale when the score in her favour was thirty-two to nothing. It was the time of Heffelfinger and Poe, McClung and King. Beach wrote an introduction which Mr. Dana classed as Homeric. Here is a bit of it: Great in the annals of Yale forever must be the name of McClung. Twice within a few minutes this man has carried the ball over the Princeton goal-line. He runs like a deer, has the stability of footing of one of the pyramids, and is absolutely cool in the most frightfully exciting circumstances. A curious figure is McClung. He has just finished a run of twenty yards, with all Princeton shoving against him. He is steaming like a pot of porridge, and chewing gum. His vigorously working profile is clearly outlined against the descending sun. How dirty he is! His paddings seem to have become loosed and to have accumulated over his knees. He has a shield, a sort of splint, bound upon his right shin. His long hair is held in a band, a linen fillet, the dirtiest ever worn.