Clarke would put the obvious heading on a long, matter-of-fact yarn in two minutes, but he might spend half an hour--if he had it to spare--polishing a head for a short and sparkling piece of work. Two architects who did city work pleaded poverty, but admitted having turned over property to their wives. Clarke headed the story: “We’re Broke,” Says Horgan.--“Sure,” Says Slattery, “But Our Wives Are Doing Fine.” A brief item about the arrest of some boys for stealing five copies of “The Simple Life” he headed “Tempted Beyond Their Strength.” Over a paragraph telling of the killing of a Park Row newsboy by a truck he wrote: “A Sparrow Falls.” Clarke had a besetting fear that Russell Sage would die suddenly late at night, and that the _Sun_ would not learn of it in time. Again and again false “hunches” caused him to send men to the Sage home on Fifth Avenue to discover the state of the old millionaire’s health. When Mr. Sage became seriously ill, reporters were sent in relays to watch the house. One man who had such an assignment turned up at the _Sun_ office at one o’clock in the morning. “I left Mr. Sage’s house,” he explained to Clarke, “because Dr. Blank just came out and I had a little talk with him. He asked me if S. M. Clarke was still night city editor of the _Sun_; and when I told him that you were, he said: “‘Tell Selah for me that I will call him personally on the ’phone if there is the least change in Mr. Sage’s condition. Selah and I are old friends; we used to be room-mates in college.’” “Blank always was a darn liar!” said Mr. Clarke. “Go back to the house and sit on the door-step.” On February 28, 1917, five years after Clarke retired, the Sun Alumni Association gave a dinner in his honour, with Mr. Lord presiding. Men came five hundred miles for the event, and the speeches were entirely about Clarke and his work. Mr. Clarke himself, who was only five miles away, sent a kindly letter to say that he was pleased, but that he could not imagine anything more absurd than a man’s attending a dinner given in his own honour. Clarke was a factor in that nebulous institution so frequently referred to as the “_Sun_ school of journalism,” a college in which the teaching was by example rather than precept. Clarke occasionally told the young reporters how not to do it, but his real lessons were given in the columns of the _Sun_. There, in cold type, the man could see that Clarke had thrown his beautiful introduction on the floor, had lifted a word or a phrase from the middle of the article and put it to the fore, or had, by one of the touches which marked the great copy-reader’s genius, breathed life into the narrative. Clarke had no rules for improving a story, but he had a faculty, not uncommon among the finest copy-readers, of seeing an event more clearly than it had appeared to the reporter who described it, even when the desk man’s information came entirely from the reporter’s screed.