Nicholas Biddle and his friends could fill other papers with arguments, but the _Sun_ kept its space for police items, stories of authenticated ghosts, and yarns about the late Emperor Napoleon. The removal of William J. Duane as Secretary of the Treasury got two lines on a page where a big shark caught off Barnstable got three lines, and the feeding of the anaconda at the American Museum a quarter of a column. Miss Susan Allen, who bought a cigar on Broadway and was arrested when she smoked it while she danced in the street, was featured more prominently than the expected visit to New York of Mr. Henry Clay, after whom millions of cigars were to be named. For the satisfaction of universal curiosity it must be reported that Miss Allen was discharged. On October 1 of that same year--1833--the _Sun_ came out for better fire-fighting apparatus, urging that the engines should be drawn by horses, as in London. In the same issue it assailed the gambling-house in Park Row, and scorned the allegation of Colonel Hamilton, a British traveller, that the tooth-brush was unknown in America. Slowly the paper was getting better, printing more local news; and it could afford to, for the penny _Sun_ idea had taken hold of New York, and the sales were larger every week. Wisner was stretching the police-court pieces out to nearly two columns. Now and then, perhaps when Mr. Day was away fishing, the reporter would slip in an Abolition paragraph or a gloomy poem on the horrors of slavery. But he was so valuable that, while his chief did not raise his salary of four dollars a week, he offered him half the paper, the same to be paid for out of the profits. And so, in January of 1834, Wisner became a half-owner of the _Sun_. Benton, another _Sun_ printer, also wanted an interest, and left when he could not get it. Before it was two months old the _Sun_ had begun to take an interest in aeronautics. It printed a full column, October 16, 1833, on the subject of Durant’s balloon ascensions, and quoted Napoleon as saying that the only insurmountable difficulty of the balloon in war was the impossibility of guiding its course. “This difficulty Dr. Durant is now endeavoring to obviate.” And the _Sun_ added: May we not therefore look to the time, in perspective, when our atmosphere will be traversed with as much facility as our waters? In the issue of October 17 a skit, possibly by Mr. Day himself, gave a picture of the trials of an editor of the period: SCENE--An editor’s closet--editor solus. “Well, a pretty day’s work of it I shall make. News, I have nothing--politics, stale, flat, and unprofitable--miscellany, enough of it--miscellany bills payable, and a miscellaneous list of subscribers with tastes as miscellaneous as the tongues of Babel. Ha! Footsteps! Drop the first person singular and don the plural. WE must now play the editor.” (Enter Devil)--“Copy, sir!”