There was gambling on Park Row--Chatham Row, it was called then--games in the Elysian Fields of Hoboken on Sundays, and duels there on week-days; picnickings in the woods about where the Ritz-Carlton stands to-day; horse-racing on the Boulevard, now upper Broadway, and rowing races on the Harlem. Those who liked thoroughbred racing went to the Union Course on Long Island, or to Saratoga. Club life was young. Cooper, Halleck, Bryant, and other literary moguls had started the Bread and Cheese Club in 1824. The Hone Club, named for Mayor Hone, sprang up in 1836, and gave dinners for Daniel Webster, William H. Seward, and other great Whigs. In that same year the Union Club was founded--the oldest New York club that is still in existence. The _Sun_ was not as popular in the clubs as it is to-day. A clubman of 1837 caught reading any newspaper except the _Courier and Enquirer_, the _Evening Post_, or one of their like, would have been frowned upon by his colleagues. The _Sun_ found plenty to print. “We write,” it boasted, “more original editorial matter than any other paper in the city, great or small.” It poked with its paragraphs at the shinplaster, that small form of currency issued by private bankers. It made fun of phrenology, then one of the fads. It jeered at animal magnetism, another craze. It had the Papineau rebellion, the Patriot War, Indian uprisings, and the belated news from Europe. It printed extracts from the “Pickwick Papers.” Dickens was all the rage. The _Sun’s_ comment on “Nicholas Nickleby,” when Dickens’s fourth book reached New York in 1838, was that it was as well written as “Oliver Twist,” and “not so gloomy.” Yet the grimness of the earlier novel had a fascination for the youth of that day. It was this book, read by candle-light after the store was closed, that so weakened the eyes of Charles A. Dana--still clerking in Buffalo--that he believed he would have to become a farmer. The _Sun_ did not mention, in its report of the Patriot War, that Dana was a member of the Home Guard in Buffalo, and had ideas of enlisting as a regular soldier. The _Sun_ did not know of the youth’s existence; nor is it likely that he read Mr. Day’s paper. A piece of “newspaper news” was printed in the _Sun_ of June 1, 1837--a description of the first so-called endless paper roll in operation. Day still printed on small, flat sheets, but evidently he was impressed with the novelty. The touch about the rag-mill, of course, was fiction: We have been shown a sheet of paper about a hundred feet in length and two feet wide, printed on both sides by a machine at one operation. This extraordinary invention enables a person to print off any length of paper required for any number of copies of a work or a public journal without a single stop, and without the assistance of any person except one to put in the rags at the extremity of the machine.