The steamship, still a novelty, was the big thing in newspaperdom. While the _Sun_ did not neglect the police-court reports and the animal stories so dear to its readers, the latest news from abroad usually had the place of honour on the second page. The first page remained the home of the advertisement and the haunt of the miscellaneous article. It was by ship that _Sun_ readers learned of Daguerre and his picture-taking device; of Cobden and the Anti-Corn-Law League; of the war between Abd-el-Kader and the French; of Don Carlos and his ups and downs--mostly downs; of the first British invasion of Afghanistan. There was the young queen, Victoria, always interesting, and there were the doings of actors known to America: At the queen’s desire, her tutor, Dr. Davys--father to the Miss Davys whose ears the queen boxed--has been appointed Bishop of Marlborough. Charles Kean’s friends say he has been offered the sum of sixty pounds a night for sixty nights in New York. On June 1, 1839, the _Sun_ got out an extra on the arrival, at three o’clock that morning, of the Great Western, after a passage of thirteen days--the fastest trip up to that time--and fifty-seven thousand copies of the paper were sold. The _Sun’s_ own sailing vessels met the incoming steamships down the bay. The _Sun_ boasted: In consequence of our news-boat arrangements we receive our papers more than an hour earlier than any other paper in this city. On the arrival of the Liverpool [July 1, 1839], we proceeded to issue an extra, which will reach Albany with the news twelve hours before it will be published in the regular editions of their evening papers, and twenty-four hours ahead of the morning papers. The _Sun_ had woodcuts made of all the leading ships, and these, with their curly waves, lit up a page wonderfully, if not beautifully. When the British Queen arrived on July 28, 1839, there was a half-page picture of her. She was the finest ship that had ever been built in Great Britain, with her total length of two hundred and seventy-five feet--less than one-third as much as some of the modern giants--and her paddle-wheels with a diameter of thirty-one feet. Small wonder that the _Sun_ favoured New York with a Sunday paper in honour of the event, and that the Monday sale, with the same feature, was forty-nine thousand. Quoth the _Sun_: Who will wonder, after this, that the lazy, lumbering _lazaroni_ of Wall Street stick up their noses at us? In January, 1840, when the packet-ships United States and England arrived together, the _Sun_ gave the story a front-page display, and actually used full-faced type for the subheads of the article. A tragedy is recalled in one paragraph of the _Sun’s_ account of the arrival of the Great Western on April 26, 1841: Up to the closing of the mail from Liverpool to London on the 7th, the steamer President had not arrived.