Other short stories of Mr. Mitchell’s, like “The Man Without a Body” and “The Balloon Tree,” are remembered by older _Sun_ readers for their ingenious form and delightful narrative. Mr. Mitchell’s smaller sketches, numbering perhaps three hundred, included not only fancy but humour, and particularly little burlesques delicately picturing the weaknesses of the great or quasi-great men of the day. As a change from his strictly editorial work he might write a description of Mark Twain in his observatory, armed with a boat-hook and preparing to fend off a comet; or, becoming Mr. Dana’s reporter, he would expose a spiritualistic séance of the Eddy Brothers somewhere up in Vermont, or go to Madison Square to record the progress of George Francis Train toward world dictatorship by self-evolution on a diet of peanuts; or he would write a dramatic criticism of the appearance of the _Sun’s_ droll friend, George, the Count Joannes, as _Hamlet_. These few instances, a dozen out of twenty thousand articles that Mr. Mitchell wrote for the _Sun_, are not mentioned as a key to the general tenor of his work--which has covered everything from the definition of a mugwump to the interpretation of a President’s Constitutional powers--but rather as an indication of the _Sun’s_ catholicity in subjects. If incidentally they serve to counteract the impression that the editorship of a great newspaper is gained through mere erudition, as opposed to a fine understanding of the very human reader, so much the better. From his first day with the _Sun_ Mr. Mitchell absorbed his chief’s lifelong belief that the range of public interest was infinite. As he said in 1916, in an address to the students of the Pulitzer School of Journalism on “The Newspaper Value of Non-Essentials”: Sometimes people are as much interested in queer names, like Poke Stogis, for example, or in the discussion of a question such as “What Is the Best Ghost in Fiction?” or “How Should Engaged Couples Act at the Circus?” or “What Is a Dodunk?” or “Do the Angels Play Football?” as some other people are interested in the conference of the great powers. It is well to remember always this psychological factor. Both the range of the newspaper and the attractive power of the writer for the newspaper in any department depend upon the breadth of sympathy with human affairs and the diversity of things in which he, the writer, takes a genuine personal interest. In that speech the _Sun’s_ judgment of what the people want, whether it be in news, editorial, or fiction, is restated exactly as it might have been stated at any time within the last fifty years. And Dana and Mitchell are found in agreement not only upon the subject of what the reader wishes, but upon the necessity for the preservation in newspapers, as well as in books, of the ideals of the language. Speaking at a conference held at Princeton University in 1917, Mr. Mitchell said: