“He patted me on the back and turned and walked east toward his death. Wasn’t it strange that Gene said that? “You know how he was killed, of course, and how--now let me talk about it, children, if I want to. I promised you, didn’t I, that I wouldn’t cry any more or carry on? Well, it was five o’clock this morning when a boy rang the bell here at the house, and I looked out the window and said: “‘Is Gene dead?’ “‘No, ma’am,’ answered the lad; ‘but they told me to tell you he was hurt in a fire and is in the hospital.’ “Jerry, my other boy, had opened the door for the lad, and was talking to him while I dressed a bit. And then I walked down-stairs and saw Jerry standing silent under the gaslight; and I said again, ‘Jerry, is Gene dead?’ And he said ‘Yes,’ and he went out. “After a while I went down to the Oak Street Station myself, because I couldn’t wait for Jerry to come back. The policemen all stopped talking when I came in, and then one of them told me it was against the rules to show me Gene at that time; but I knew the policeman only thought I’d break down. I promised him I wouldn’t carry on, and he took me into a room to let me see Gene. It was Gene.” The _Sun_ has been richly fortunate in the humour that has tinged its news columns since its very beginning. Even Ben Day, with all the worries of a pioneer journalist, made the types exact a smile from his readers. With Dana, amusing the people was second only to instructing them. Julian Ralph and Wilbur Chamberlin both had the trick of putting together the bricks of fact with the mortar of humour. Chamberlin had several characters, like his _Insec’ O’Connor_, whose strings he pulled and made to dance. Hardly a sea-story of Sam Wood’s--except where there is tragedy--does not contain something to be laughed over. Samuel Hopkins Adams was an adept at the comic twist. Lindsay Denison once wrote a story of a semipublic celebration of an engagement so delightfully that the bride’s father, perhaps the only person in New York who did not see the humour of the affair, threatened to break the pledge of troth, although the groom was a public character who had courted publicity all his life. Charles Selden, as grave a reporter as ever glowered at a poor space-bill, had a vein of structural humour perhaps unsurpassed by any reporter. His account of a press reception at the home of Miss Lillian Russell has been approached in delicacy only by O’Malley’s interview with Miss Laura Jean Libbey. Selden’s story of the occasion when creditors took away all the furniture of John L. Sullivan’s café--except the one chair upon which the champion snoozed--was a model of dry, unlaboured humour.