No man can say when the germ of the story first took shape. It might have been designed at any time after Herschel laid the plans for his voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, and that was at least two years before it appeared in the _Sun_. Was Nicollet in New York then, and did he and Locke lay their heads together across a table at the American Hotel and plan the great deceit? There was one head full of figures and the stars; another crammed with the imagination that brought forth the fire-making biped beavers and the fascinating, if indecorous, human bats. If they never met, more is the pity. Whether they met, none can say. Go to ask the ghosts of the American Hotel, and you find it gone, and in its place the Woolworth Building, earth’s spear levelled at the laughing moon. Whatever happened, the credit must rest with Richard Adams Locke. Even if the technical embellishments of the moon story were borrowed, still his was the genius that builded the great temple, made flowers to bloom in the lunar valleys, and grew the filmy wings on the _vespertilio-homo_. His was the art that caused the bricklayer of Cherry Street to sit late beside his candle, spelling out the rare story with joyous labour. It must have been a reward to Locke, even to the last of his seventy years, to know that he had made people read newspapers who never had read them before; for that is what he really accomplished by this huge, complex lie. “From the epoch of the hoax,” wrote Poe, “the Sun shone with unmitigated splendor. Its success firmly established the ‘penny system’ throughout the country, and (through the _Sun_) consequently we are indebted to the genius of Mr. Locke for one of the most important steps ever yet taken in the pathway of human progress.” CHAPTER IV DAY FINDS A RIVAL IN BENNETT _The Success of “The Sun” Leads to the Founding of the “Herald.”--Enterprises and Quarrels of a Furious Young Journalism.--The Picturesque Webb.--Maria Monk._ The usefulness of Richard Adams Locke as a _Sun_ reporter did not end with the moon hoax. Far from expressing regret that its employee had gulled half the earth, the _Sun_ continued to meet exposure with a calm and almost flippant front, insisting that it would never admit the non-existence of the man-bats until official contradiction arrived from Edinburgh or the Cape of Good Hope. The paper realized the value, in public interest, of Locke’s name, and was proud to announce, in November of 1835, that it had commissioned Locke to write another series of articles, telling the story of the “Life and Adventures of Manuel Fernandez, otherwise Richard C. Jackson, convicted of the murder of John Roberts, and to be executed at the Bellevue Prison, New York, on Thursday next, the 19th instant.”