Dana’s happiest days were spent at his country place, Dosoris, an island near Glen Cove, on the north shore of Long Island. There, around a large, old-fashioned, square frame house, he made roads and flower-beds and planted trees from many parts of the world. He grew an oak from an acorn that was brought from the tomb of Confucius. He knew Gray’s “Botany” almost by heart, and could give an intimate description of every flower in the Dosoris gardens. His interest in plants was so deep that once, while travelling in Cuba with an eminent painter, he led his companion for hours through the hot hills of Vuelta Abajo in order to satisfy himself that a certain variety of pine did _not_ grow in that region. Dana’s was a normal, healthy life. He was a good horseman and swimmer and a great walker. When he was seventy-five years old he climbed to the top of Croyden Mountain, in New Hampshire, with a party of younger men puffing behind him. He found pleasure in all of life, whether it was at the office, where he worked steadily but not feverishly, or with his family among the rural delights of Dosoris, or surrounded by congenial literary spirits at the dinner-table. He knew no illness until his last summer. Up to June, 1897, the sturdy figure and the kindly face framed in a white beard were as familiar to the _Sun_ office as they were in the seventies. With Dana there was no slow decay of body or mind. He died at Dosoris on October 17, 1897, in the thirtieth year of his reign over the _Sun_. A few years before, on observing an obituary paragraph which Mr. Dana had written about some noted man, John Swinton asked his chief how much space he (Swinton) would get when his time came. “For you, John, two sticks,” said Mr. Dana. Turning to Mr. Mitchell, then his chief editorial writer, he added: “For me, two lines.” On the morning after Mr. Dana’s death every newspaper but one in New York printed columns about the career of the dean of American journalism. The _Sun_ printed only ten words, and these were carried at the head of the first editorial column, without a heading: CHARLES ANDERSON DANA, editor of the _Sun_, died yesterday afternoon. Mr. Swinton perhaps believed that Mr. Dana was joking when he said “two lines,” but Mr. Mitchell knew that his chief was in earnest. The order was characteristic of Dana. It was not false modesty. Perhaps it was a certain fine vanity that told him what was true--that he and his work were known throughout the land; that the _Sun_, in its perfection the product of his genius and vigour, would continue to rise as regularly as its celestial namesake; that all he had done would live on. He had made the paper so great that the withdrawal from it of one man’s hand was negligible.