Stone was at this time forty-four years old. He had been editor of the Herkimer _American_, with Thurlow Weed as his journeyman; of the _Northern Whig_, of Hudson, New York; of the Albany _Daily Advertiser_, and of the Hartford _Mirror_. In 1821 he came to New York and succeeded Zachariah Lewis as editor of the _Commercial Advertiser_. As a Mason he had a controversy with John Quincy Adams, who was prominent in the anti-Masonic movement. Stone was prominent politically. In 1825 he and Thurlow Weed accompanied Lafayette in his tour of the United States. In 1841 President William Henry Harrison appointed him minister to The Hague, but when Harrison died he was recalled by President Tyler. He was also the first superintendent of the New York public schools--an office which he held at the time of his death, in 1844. Stone went to Montreal, visited the Hôtel Dieu, and minutely compared the details set down by the Monk woman in regard to the inmates of the nunnery and the plan of the building. The result of his investigation was to establish the fact that the “Awful Disclosures” were fiction, and he exposed the impostor not only in his newspaper, but in his book, “Maria Monk and the Nunnery of the Hôtel Dieu.” The adherents of the woman abused Stone roundly for this, and the general belief in her fake was not entirely dissipated for years; not even after her own evil history was told, and after the Protestant residents of Montreal had held a mass-meeting to denounce her. Maria Monk died in the city prison in New York fourteen years after she had created the most unpleasant scandal of the time. News matters of a genuine kind diverted the types from Maria Monk. There was the celebrated murder of Helen Jewett, a case in which Mr. Bennett played detective with some success, and the Alamo massacre. Crockett, Bowie, and the rest of that band of heroes met their death on March 6, 1836, but the details did not reach New York for more than a month; it was April 12 when the _Sun_ gave a column to them. Texas and the Seminole War kept the news columns full until May 10, when Colonel Webb again pounced upon James Gordon Bennett. Said the _Sun_: Upon calculating the number of public floggings which that miserable scribbler, Bennett, has received, we have pretty accurately ascertained that there is not a square inch of his body which has not been lacerated somewhere about fifteen times. In fact, he has become a common flogging property; and Webb has announced his intention to cowskin him every Monday morning until the Fourth of July, when he will offer him a holiday. We understand that Webb has offered to remit the flogging upon the condition that he will allow him to shoot him; but Bennett says: “No; skin for skin, behold, all that a man hath will he give for his life!” The _Sun_ beat the town on a great piece of news that spring. “Triumphant News from Texas! Santa Anna Captured!” the head-lines ran.