Returning to the big, bare room in the old Sun Building, cast the eye of memory through the thin forest of chandeliers entwined with lianas of electric wiring, and across the dull desks. Boss Lord has come in from dinner and is reading telegraphic bulletins from out-of-town correspondents or glancing at a growing pile of proofs. At the Albany desk Deacon Stillman is editing a batch of Congress news from Walter Clarke or Richard V. Oulahan in Washington, or of legislative news from Joseph L. McEntee in Albany, or is trying to think out an apt head for a double murder in Herkimer County. At the cable desk Cyrus C. Adams, long secretary of the American Geographical Society, is looking in a guide-book to discover whether the name of a street in Naples has not been distorted by the operators while in transit between the Rome correspondent and New York. The telegraph editor is telling the night editor, Van Anda or Smith, that he has “nothing much but yellow fever,” and the night editor is replying that “three-quarters of a column of yellow fever will be plenty.” At the city desk Clarke, who has half finished the heading on a bit about a green heron seen in Bronx Park, picks up the telephone to tell an East Side police-station reporter to investigate the report of an excursion boat gone aground on Hart’s Island, and then turns away to tell Ralph, or Chamberlin, or Joseph Fox, or Irwin, or Hill, or O’Malley, that a column and a half lead will do for the police investigation, or the great public dinner, or whatever his task may have been. As he finishes, a reporter lays on his desk a long story, and Clarke, reading the substance of the first page of it in an instant, hands it over to his assistant to edit. At the Jersey desk Boss Patton has polished the disquisitions of a suburban correspondent on the antics of a shark in Barnegat Bay, and is explaining to a space man, almost with tears, why it was necessary to cut down his article about the picnic of the Smith family at Peapack. The sporting editor, John Mandigo, has just bade good night to some distinguished visitor--say Mr. Fitzsimmons--and is bending over some copy from Fitzgerald or Vila. Perhaps Henry of Navarre and Domino are nose-and-nose in the stretch at Gravesend, or Amos Rusie has struck out seventeen opposing batters, or Kid Lavigne has lambasted Joe Walcott quite properly at Maspeth. At a side desk a copy-reader on local news is struggling with a mass of writing from various youthful reporters. “At seven ten o’clock last evening, as Policeman McGuffin was patrolling his beat, his attention was attracted by a cry of fire,” etc. The copy-reader knows that smoke will presently issue from the upper windows; knows, too, that he presently will boil the seven pages down to three lines and gently tell the reporter why he did it.