All this time the _Sun_ was not neglecting the minor local happenings about which its patrons liked to read. The police-courts, the theatres, and the little scandals had their column or two. CHAPTER V NEW YORK LIFE IN THE THIRTIES _A Sprightly City Which Daily Bought Thirty Thousand Copies of “The Sun.”--The Rush to Start Penny Papers.--Day Sells “The Sun” for Forty Thousand Dollars._ No dull city, that New York of Ben Day’s time! Almost a dozen theatres of the first class were running. The Bowery, the first playhouse in America to have a stage lighted with gas, had already been twice burned and rebuilt. The Park, which saw the American début of Macready, Edwin Forrest, and James H. Hackett, was offering such actors as Charles Kean, Charles and Fanny Kemble, Charles Mathews, Sol Smith, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Wood, and Master Joseph Burke, the Irish Roscius. Forrest, then talked of as a candidate for Congress, was the favourite of New York. On his appearance, said a _Sun_ review of his acting in “King Lear,” the audience uttered “the roar of seven thunders.” There was vaudeville to be enjoyed at Niblo’s Garden, a circus at Vauxhall Garden. Drama held the boards at the Olympic and the National. The Franklin was one of the new theatres. It was in Chatham Street, between James and Oliver, and it was there that Barney Williams, the _Sun’s_ pioneer newsboy, made his first stage appearance, as a jig-dancer, when he was about fifteen years old. Charlotte Cushman, Hackett, Forrest, and Sol Smith were the leading American actors of that day, although Junius Brutus Booth had achieved some prominence. Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson, William J. Florence, and Maggie Mitchell were children, all a little older than the _Sun_. John T. Raymond was born at Buffalo in 1836, John E. McCullough in Ireland the next year, and Lawrence Barrett at Paterson, New Jersey, in 1838. The hotels were temples of plenty. English travellers, going to the new Astor, the American, Niblo’s, or the New York House, recoiled in horror at the appetite of the Yankee. At breakfast they saw the untutored American break two or three boiled eggs into a tumbler and eat them therefrom--and then they wrote letters to the London _Times_ about it. At dinner, served in the hotels about noon--three o’clock was the fashionable hour in private houses--the hungry New Yorker, including Mr. Day and his brother-in-law, Mr. Beach, would sit down to roast beef, venison, prairie-chicken, and a half-dozen vegetables. Bottles of brandy stood in the centre of the table for him who would; surely not for Mr. Day, who printed daily pieces about the effects of strong drink!