If a reporter found his story in the paper almost untouched by Clarke’s pencil and adorned with a typical Clarkean head, it was a signal to him that he had done well. He was sure not to get verbal approbation from Clarke. There is a legend that Clarke once cried “Fine!” after skimming over a sheet of well-written copy, but it is only a legend. With a reporter who never wrote introductions and never padded his articles Clarke would sometimes crack a joke. _Sun_ traditions have it that once, after a reporter had turned New York inside out to dig out a particularly difficult piece of news, the night city editor remarked to his assistant that that reporter “was a handy man to have around the office.” Although Clarke has been referred to by an excellent judge, Will Irwin, as “the greatest living schoolmaster of newspapermen,” his methods could never be adapted to the academies of journalism. As a schoolmaster of a more positive type, _Sun_ men remember the late Francis T. Patton, who edited suburban news for twenty years. Staff men on assignments in New Jersey, Westchester, Long Island, and other places just beyond the city turned in their copy to “Boss” Patton, a cultured man who spent his spare hours reading old Latin works in the original or working out chess problems. It was to him that the bewildered cub turned in his hour of torment, and Patton would tell him how long his story ought to run, how he might begin it, how end it. “I know it isn’t right to fake, Mr. Patton,” said a new reporter; “but is exaggeration never permissible?” “It is,” said Patton. “You may use exaggeration whenever it is needed to convey to the reader an adequate but not exaggerated picture of the event you are describing. For instance, if you are reporting a storm at Seabright, and the waves are eight and one-half feet high by the tape which you surely carry in your hip-pocket for such emergencies, it will hardly do to inform the reader that the waves are eight and one-half feet high; his visualization of the scene would not be perfect. Yet, if you write that the waves ran mountain-high, I shall change your copy if it comes to me. The expression would be too stale. Hyperbole is one of the gifts.” [Illustration: SAMUEL A. WOOD ] [Illustration: OSCAR KING DAVIS ] [Illustration: THOMAS M. DIEUAIDE ] [Illustration: SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS ] Patton’s droll humour was one of the delights of the _Sun_ office. One night Charles M. Fairbanks was writing, for the _Herald_, a story about “The Men Who Make the _Sun_ Shine.” He asked Patton for something about himself. “You may say,” replied the boss of the suburban desk, “that my characteristics are brilliancy, trustworthiness, accuracy, and poetic fervour.” “Boss,” said a young reporter to Mr. Patton, “I often think you and I could run this paper better than the men who are running it.”