Day was really out of the _Sun_ then, after having been its master for five years lacking sixty-seven days, and the paper passed into the actual ownership of Beach, who had married Day’s sister, and who had acted as the bookkeeper of the _Sun_ almost from its inception. There were those, including Edgar Allan Poe, who believed that Beach was the boss of the _Sun_ even in the days of the moon hoax, but they were mistaken. The paper, as the _Sun_ itself remarked on December 4, 1835, was “altogether ruled by Benjamin H. Day.” “I owned the whole concern,” said Mr. Day in 1883, “till I sold it to Beach. And the silliest thing I ever did in my life was to sell that paper!” And why did Day sell, for forty thousand dollars, a paper which had the largest circulation in the world--about thirty thousand copies? The answer is that it was not paying as well as it had paid. There were a couple of years when his profits had been as high as twenty thousand dollars. The net return for the six months ending October 1, 1836, as announced by the _Sun_ on April 19, 1837, was $12,981.88; but at the time when Day sold out, the _Sun_ was about breaking even. The advertising, due to general dulness in business--for which the bank failures and the big fire were partly to blame--had fallen off. It was costing Day three hundred dollars a week more for operating expenses and materials than he got for the sales of newspapers, and this loss was barely made up by the advertising receipts. With what he had saved, and the forty thousand paid to him by Beach, he would have a comfortable fortune. He was only twenty-eight years old, and there might be other worlds to conquer. From nothing at all except his own industry and common sense Day had built up an enterprise which the _Sun_ itself thus described a few days before the change of ownership: Some idea of the business done in the little three-story building at the corner of Nassau and Spruce Streets occupied by the _Sun_ for the publication of a penny paper may be formed from the fact that the annual outlay for material and wages exceeds ninety-three thousand dollars--very nearly two thousand a week, and more than three hundred a day for the six working days. On this outlay we circulate daily thirty thousand papers. Allowing the other nine morning papers an average of three thousand circulation--which may fall short in two or three cases, while it is a large estimate for all the rest--it will appear that the circulation of the _Sun_ newspaper is daily more than of all the others united.