He also wrote, or clipped from some out-of-town newspaper, a poem that would fill nearly a column. He rewrote news items from the West and South--some of them not more than a month old. As for the snappy local news of the day, he bought, in the small hours of that Tuesday morning, a copy of the _Courier and Enquirer_, the livest of the six-cent papers, took it to the single room in William Street, clipped out or rewrote the police-court items, and set them up himself. A boy, whose name is unknown to fame, assisted him at devil’s work. A journeyman printer, Parmlee, helped with the press when the last quoin had been made tight in the fourth and last of the little pages. The sun was well up in the sky before its namesake of New York came slowly, hesitatingly, almost sadly, up over the horizon of journalism--never to set! In the years to follow, the _Sun_ was to have changes in ownership, in policy, in size, and in style, but no week-day was to come when it could not shine. Of all the morning newspapers printed in New York on that 3rd of September, 1833, there is only one other--the _Journal of Commerce_--left. But young Mr. Day, wiping the ink from his hands at noon, and waiting in doubt to see whether the public would buy the thousand _Suns_ he had printed, could not foresee this. Neither could he know that, by this humble effort to exalt his printing business, he had driven a knife into the sclerotic heart of ancient journalism. The sixpenny papers were to laugh at this tiny intruder--to laugh and laugh, and to die. The size of the first _Sun_ was eleven and one-quarter by eight inches, not a great deal bigger than a sheet of commercial letter paper, and considerably less than one-quarter the size of a page of the _Sun_ of to-day. Compared with the first _Sun_, the present newspaper is about sixteen times larger. The type was a good, plain face of agate, with some verse on the last page in nonpareil. An almost perfect reprint of the first _Sun_ was issued as a supplement to the paper on its twentieth birthday, in 1853, and again--to the number of about one hundred and sixty thousand copies--on its fiftieth birthday, in 1883. Many of the persons who treasure the replicas of 1883 believe them to be original first numbers, as they were not labelled “Presented gratuitously to the subscribers of the _Sun_,” as was the issue of 1853. Hardly a month passes by but the _Sun_ receives one of them from some proud owner. It is easy, however, to tell the reprint from the original, for Mr. Day in his haste committed an error at the masthead of the editorial or second page of the first number. The date-line there reads “September 3, 1832,” while in the reprints it is “September 3, 1833,” as it should have been, but wasn’t, in the original. And there are minor typographical differences, invisible to the layman.