Will Irwin’s great page story, printed beside the straight news of the San Francisco earthquake, is another _Sun_ classic. Irwin had the fortune to be familiar with San Francisco, and he was able, without reference to book or map, to give to New York, through the _Sun_, a most vivid picture of “The City That Was.” It is a literary companion-piece of Thomas M. Dieuaide’s gray drawing of St. Pierre, but only the introduction must do here: The old San Francisco is dead. The gayest, lightest-hearted, most pleasure-loving city of this continent, and in many ways the most interesting and romantic, is a horde of huddled refugees living among ruins. It may rebuild; it probably will; but those who have known that peculiar city by the Golden Gate, and have caught its flavor of the “Arabian Nights” feel that it can never be the same. It is as though a pretty, frivolous woman had passed through a great tragedy. She survives, but she is sobered and different. If it rises out of the ashes it must be a modern city, much like other cities and without its old flavor. There were less than five columns of the article, but it told the whole story of San Francisco; not in dry figures of commerce and paved streets, but of the people and places that every Eastern man had longed to see, but now never could see. Writers like Ralph and Chamberlin, Dieuaide and Irwin, are spoken of as “star” reporters, yet the saying that the _Sun_ has no star men is not entirely fictional. Its best reporters are, and will be, remembered as stars, but no men were, or are, treated as stars. Big reporters cover little stories and cubs write big ones--if they can. A city editor does not send an inexperienced man on an assignment that requires all the skill of the trained reporter, yet it is _Sun_ history that many new men have turned in big stories from assignments that appeared, at first blush, to be inconsequential. There are always two or three so-called star men in the office, but the days when there are two or three star assignments are comparatively few. Let us take, arbitrarily, one day twenty-five years ago--February 1, 1893--and see what some of the _Sun_ reporters did: