Let him know that something had happened in the city, and his drag-net system was started. No matter how remote the happening, how apparently hopeless the clue, he let neither man nor telephone rest until every possible corner had been searched for the guilty news item. Once the situation was in hand he would return to the adornment of a head-line or the working out of some abstruse problem in mathematics--perhaps the angles of a sun-dial, for Clarke’s hobby was gnomonics, and he knew dials from Ptolemy’s time down. As a rest from mathematics he might write a limerick in Greek, and then carefully tear it up. Almost every newspaper in New York tried, at one time or another, to take Clarke from the _Sun_. One night an emissary from one of the apostles of the then new journalism entered the _Sun_ office and sent his card to Mr. Clarke. When the night city editor appeared, he whispered: “Mr. ---- says that if you’ll ascertain the highest salary the _Sun_ will pay you to stay, he’ll double it.” Clarke uttered the strange sound that was his indulgence when disagreeably disturbed--a cross between a growl and a grunt--and turned back toward his desk. “He’ll triple it!” cried the tempter. Although Clarke heard the words, he kept on to his desk, and not only never mentioned the matter, but probably never thought of it again. On another occasion he made a notable trip to the gate at the entrance to the big room. A drunken visitor was making the place ring with yells, and the office-boys could not stop him. Clarke bore the noise for ten minutes, and then, remarking, “This is unendurable!” went and threw the man down the stairs. Clarke was the hero of a dozen newspaper stories, which he scorned to read. “Do you know, Mr. Clarke,” said a reporter who did not know how shy “the boss” was, “that Blank has put you into a short story in _Space’s Magazine_?” “Who is Blank?” said Clarke shortly. “Why,” said his informant, “he worked here for several weeks.” “Oh, Lord!” said Clarke. “I can’t be expected, can I, to remember all the geniuses that come and go?” There was a mild ferocity about him that caused more than one cub to think that the night boss was unfriendly, but this attitude had a good effect. No young reporter ever made the same mistake twice. “If you mean ‘child,’ write it so,” he would say. “Don’t write it ‘tot.’ And please have more variety in your motor cars. I have seen several that were not large and red and high-powered.” The head-lines of the _Sun_ have been well written since the first days of Dana, and Clarke, for thirty years, was the best of the head-line writers. He wrote rhyming heads for Sam Wood’s prose verse, satirical heads for satires, humorous heads for the funny men’s articles. A _Sun_ reader could gauge almost exactly the worth of an article by the quality of the heading. A _Sun_ reporter could tell just what Clarke thought of his story by the cleverness of the lines that the night city editor wrote above it.